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 Books by Kylie Lee Baker
available from Inkyard Press

The Keeper of Night

The Empress of Time

*
The Scarlet Alchemist

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ISBN-13: 978-1-335-45801-8

The Scarlet Alchemist

Copyright © 2023 by Kylie Lee Baker

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner
whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations
embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the
product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to
actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events or locales is entirely
coincidental.

For questions and comments about the quality of this book, please contact us
at [email protected].
Inkyard Press
22 Adelaide St. West, 41st Floor
Toronto, Ontario M5H 4E3, Canada
www.InkyardPress.com

Printed in U.S.A.

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9781335458018_SmHC_PL.indd 5
To Ruby
This one’s for you

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 During the Tang dynasty, Chinese alchemists tried to create
an elixir of immortality. This story is what might have hap-
pened if they’d succeeded. Because this is an alternate history
that reimagines China as it might have developed a century
after this discovery, many historical details have been con-
sciously changed. As such, please do not use this book as an
authoritative source on Chinese history or culture.
In particular, please note that while the alchemy in this
book is based loosely on the principles and goals of eighth-
century Chinese Taoist alchemy, the depiction is entirely fic-
tional and is not ref lective of historical or modern Taoist
practices. This book also includes contemporary Mandarin
and Cantonese words, which differ greatly from the Middle
Chinese that was spoken during the Tang dynasty. The au-
thor made this decision for the sake of relatability and ease of
reading for modern Chinese speakers (as well as a reluctance
to learn a dead language for the sake of a fantasy novel).

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The Scarle_9781335458018_SmHC_txt_415964.indd 8 2023-06-14 7:50 AM
 I remember the day of darkness, even if no one else does.
When I close my eyes, I’m standing in a city my aunt says
I’ve never visited, with my parents, who no longer exist.
The city of Chang’an is like a lifetime in a single moment,
brimming with words in a thousand languages, the ghosts of
footsteps softening the rammed dirt roads, silk clothes that
shimmer like fish scales as people glint down the wide streets.
At the faraway end of the road is a great stone gate with five
doors opening into darkness.
I don’t know what’s behind the gate, but I move closer,
away from my parents, past the merchants and their goatskin
bags spilling wine, the pilgrims in robes the color of dust,
the dancers in jewels that sharpen the sun’s rays and cast them
back at me like daggers.
There is something beyond the gate. I’m sure of it. The five
archways are screaming mouths, calling out for me.
A gong echoes, then the world f lips and disappears, a door
slammed shut in my face. I reach out for my mother, and my
fingers snap in all different directions with a thousand tiny
pops, like fireworks. I’m falling through a world that’s turned

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 to sand, tumbling into the night sky. The universe unfolds my
skin and stretches me across its endless dark, a pale tent over
all the stars. I am the night that birthed the world. I am the
bones of all the planets. I am silence. I am the end.
I hear my father’s voice speaking to me in a language that
I’ve long forgotten. The words rise and fall like slow gusts
of wind spilling across a valley, shivering through the grass.
Somehow I know that they’re of great importance, but I am
made of silk and the words f low through me. The only word
I understand is my name. Zilan. Zilan. Zilan.
I wake in a bed in Guangzhou in my mother’s arms. My
parents tell me it was a dream, but I know better.
I know because the way they look at me has changed.
They watch me when they think I’m not paying attention,
their gazes crawling up the knobs of my spine. They’re wait-
ing for something.
What did I do? I think one thousand times over. But no
one will tell me.
Then my mother dies and my father vanishes, and there is
no one left to ask.
I am the only one who remembers.

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 Year 775
Guangzhou, China

At high noon on the first day of the summer solstice, old man
Gou barged into the shop carrying a rancid hemp bag over
his shoulder. Even if I ignored the suspiciously human-shaped
bulge inside, or the brown ooze sloughing onto my f loor, or
the purple fingertips dangling out the untied end, I would
know that scent anywhere.
I closed my book and set down my tea that now tasted
sour, the smell of hot corpse knifing up my nose and mak-
ing saliva pool at the base of my throat, like I was going to
be sick. I liked to think I was good at breathing through my
mouth and swallowing back the nausea like a professional, but
I typically only came across corpses when I was expecting to.
“You can’t bring that in here,” I said, taking a quick sip
of tea to force down anything besides words that wanted to
come up.
Old man Gou kept walking forward like he hadn’t heard
me, hitching the bag higher on his shoulder. “I need you to—”

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 “I know what you need,” I said. “That’s not how this
works. You make an appointment and you go around back
after dark.”
He bristled at being interrupted, but I didn’t care. People
with leverage didn’t come to me asking for help. His gaze
twitched around the shelves packed with ceramic horses and
tiny servants on their knees, thousands of glazed clay eyes
witnessing his sins.
My family owned a míngqì store at the far west end of
Guangzhou. Uncle Fan and Auntie So molded clay into ghost
vessels to bury with the dead, and my cousins and I sold them
to grieving families. No one could take real people with them
to the afterlife, but they could take our painted ceramic steeds
and beautiful glazed clay women and faithful servants the size
of your palm. They crammed as many as they could into their
tombs, hoping that cold clay would turn to warm f lesh once
their souls crossed over, that they wouldn’t be alone in death.
When I was younger, I asked Uncle Fan if any of that was
true. He scoffed and said It doesn’t matter if it’s true, the dead
can’t ask for refunds, and slammed the kiln door shut. But the
dead could do a lot more than he thought.
That was only our business during the daylight hours.
Uncle Fan and Auntie So were blissfully unaware of where
the other half of our money came from.
“Take me to the back, then,” old man Gou said, as if it were
that simple.
I shook my head, praying that no one had seen him drag-
ging a rotting corpse to our shop in broad daylight. Getting
hanged for forbidden life alchemy would certainly interfere
with my upcoming travel plans. “I’m watching the shop now.
That’s why you need an appointment.”
He narrowed his eyes, his irises glinting gold—a side ef-
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 fect of eating too many gold nuggets. These days, the diet of
the rich was no longer steamed bear and phoenix pears but
handcrafted gold pieces with pearls as garnish, still steaming
from their alchemical transformation. Some said they ate it
with spoons instead of chopsticks because they didn’t have
the patience to eat the pieces one at a time.
A century ago, the royal alchemists learned the secret recipe
for gold that stopped you from aging and made your blood
run the color of sunlight. As long as you kept eating it forever,
your smiles would never carve scars into your cheeks, your
bones would never grow brittle and creak during rainstorms,
your skin would never sag or speckle or crease.
But even ageless bodies were still made of soft human f lesh,
and neither gold nor gems would protect the rich from disease,
or accidents, or whatever the hell had happened to the rancid
corpse that old man Gou had dragged in. Those who could
afford the gold of immortality often stayed locked away in
their mansions to protect their investment, but clearly Gou’s
family hadn’t felt the need. No one truly believed in death
until it happened to them.
“There was only a small window of time that I could remove
his body unnoticed,” old man Gou said, lowering his voice, as
if anyone unfortunate enough to pass by would actually process
his words before falling unconscious from the stench.
“Which I might have been able to accommodate, if you
had come here yesterday and made an appointment.”
Old man Gou huffed. “Is this trinket shop more important
than my brother?” he said, his grip tightening on the bag.
Important to me, or to you? I wanted to ask but knew better
than to say that to a man, even one who was breaking the
law and probably wouldn’t risk making a scene. There was a
dagger under the counter that I had no qualms about draw-
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 ing if he grew too upset, but bloodstains were annoying to
clean and hard to explain to Auntie So.
One of the problems with the death industry was that
every­one came to you with pain so great that they were con-
vinced no one else could have felt it before. They didn’t like
that I had rules, that I charged for my time, that their tears
didn’t move me.
It doesn’t matter that death is sad. This is a business, Uncle Fan
always said when customers cried. If you make a poor man’s
business a charity, within a week he’ll have twice as many beggars
and nothing left to give.
Besides, old man Gou didn’t need my charity, and if he
wanted someone to cry for his brother, he could buy a couple
mourners down the street. His satchel bulged with coins and
his purple silk robes twinkled with golden embroidery. His
hands had no callouses, no dirt caught under his nails like the
farmers or artisans. He hadn’t fallen on hard times, clearly.
He must have read the sternness on my face and decided
to change tactics, because he finally set the bag on the f loor
with a heavy sigh. I prayed whatever swampy liquid sloshing
around inside wouldn’t stain the f loor.
“Surely you don’t have many customers these days,” he said,
strolling over to a shelf and lifting a ceramic ox. I opened my
mouth to demand he put it down, but he let out a breath and
a cloud of dust f lew up into the air, the soft powder swirling
around the horribly smug look on his face.
“We have enough,” I said, gripping the edge of the counter.
People who couldn’t afford life gold were still planning funer-
als, of course, but there were no more aristocrats emptying our
shelves when their fathers passed. Most customers bought one
or two míngqì and cried over the counter while begging for
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 a lower price. We gave it to them, not because we were good
people but because a few coins were better than none at all.
Old man Gou raised an eyebrow. “You’d be better off mak-
ing chamber pots.”
I didn’t reply, because I’d actually said the same thing to
Auntie So. People can shit in a hole in the ground, not in my art,
she’d responded.
I shook my head. “Closing at random times is bad for busi-
ness.”
“Zilan síuzé,” he said, offering me a stiff smile, “please, my
brother has two young daughters.”
It took an immense effort not to roll my eyes at how sweetly
he said my name. When I was younger, he’d laughed when
his son called me gwáimūi—ghost girl—and didn’t scold him
when he ripped up all the purple orchids that grew at the
edge of the city, chewed them up, and spit them at my feet.
I couldn’t even be that mad at him, because I also wanted to
chew up my name and spit it out in a purple slurry.
Zı̌lán—written with the characters for purple orchid—wasn’t
the kind of name that you gave a girl who would be someone
important someday. It was what you got stuck with when your
father was a foreigner and your mother had—for some bizarre
reason—let him name you even though he barely spoke Chi-
nese. Maybe it was fine for Scotian girls to be named after
f lowers, but in Guangzhou, names were our parents’ hopes
and dreams for us, not just pretty things they saw in the dirt.
My cousin Wénshū’s name had the character for book in it,
because even before he’d proven his annoying aptitude for
reading, he was destined to be a scholar. My cousin Yǔfēi’s
name was a misty shroud of snow and rain, the hidden face of
a beautiful goddess. But zı̌lán was a f lower so common that it
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 couldn’t even be sold, so fragile that a few days of rain would
tear it apart. It was pretty for a moment, and then it was dead.
The shop was truly starting to smell now, and if I’d hoped
for any customers today, they certainly wouldn’t come if old
man Gou stood there any longer with his brother’s leaky
corpse. It was best to just deal with him quickly.
I sighed. “Lock the door.”
Old man Gou turned and drew the wooden bar across the
door behind him. He cleared his throat, stepping farther into
the room. “I want—”
“Payment first,” I said, tapping the counter.
He froze as if slapped. “You haven’t even looked at him yet.”
“A consultation costs fifty gold.”
His expression curdled, but he obeyed, emptying his satchel
onto the counter. Gold coins spun across the polished wood.
These were the diluted kind used for currency, not the nuggets
eaten for immortality. I could tell that from the tarnish alone.
I picked up one of the coins and held it up to the window,
examining its shine, then dropped it in my cup of tea. Real
gold always sank to the bottom, but fool’s gold—the cheaply
transformed kind that would turn back to coal in the next
hour—would f loat.
“My brother had heart pains,” old man Gou said as the
coin sank to the bottom of my teacup.
I picked up another piece and put it in my mouth, biting
down gently. Real gold was soft and malleable. This one came
out with the impression of my back molars. Satisfied that they
were real, I began to count.
“Cinnabar and mushrooms didn’t help,” old man Gou went
on.
“I am not a healer,” I said, because his voice was distract-
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 ing me from my counting. “His diagnosis doesn’t matter to
me as long as he’s in one piece.”
Old man Gou’s upper lip twitched as I lined up his gold in
neat rows. He was probably unaccustomed to being spoken
to so casually. Bags of gold could buy him many things, but
my respect was not one of them.
“This is forty-seven,” I said at last, holding out my hand
for more.
Old man Gou waved his hand at me as if it didn’t matter.
“Surely that’s enough for a consultation.”
I raised an eyebrow. “You want a consultation worth forty-
seven gold pieces?”
“Please,” he said, teeth clenched.
“As you wish,” I said, leaning over the counter. I squinted
at the sack’s hemp fabric, stained with gray liquid. I took a
deep breath, the scent of death making my eyes water.
“No,” I said, swiping his gold off the counter into my clay
bowl. “Thank you for your business.”
“No?” old man Gou said, red rushing to his face. “How
can you call that a consultation?”
“The smell,” I said, taking a long sip of my tea that now
had a metallic tang, like blood. “You waited too long to come
to me. I’m not going to reanimate a corpse with maggots for
eyes and send him on his way.”
“He has eyes!” old man Gou said, his voice rattling the row
of ceramic singers beside him. “You didn’t even look at him!”
I took another sip of tea. “Looking costs ten more gold
than what you paid me.”
“Three more! You said fifty!”
“That was before you tried to shortchange me,” I said.
“Now it’s ten more.”
Old man Gou huffed and reached into another satchel,
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 shaking his head as he counted out ten coins and slammed
them onto the counter. I added them to my bowl, then ducked
under the counter and into the shop room.
I pulled back the hemp cloth, revealing a stiff and bloated
body the color of cold porridge, his nails and lips blue. His
nose dripped with a tar-black liquid that ran down his cheeks
and pooled at the corners of his mouth. I touched his arm and
felt the skin shift back and forth as I moved my fingers, like
a piece of loose clothing. Old man Gou gagged at the smell.
“He’s already started purging,” I said. “His skin could slip
off at any moment. I can’t fix that.”
“But you can bring him back?”
I looked up, frowning. “Did you hear me? You want a brother
with no skin?”
“We’ll sew it back on,” he said, waving his hand like it was
a minor inconvenience. “Anything’s better than death, isn’t it?”
I narrowed my eyes. “To you. He won’t be able to go out-
side. His appearance will alarm people.”
“Our house is large enough that he won’t be bored,” he
said. “Can you do it or not?”
If I could afford to have a conscience, I would have said no.
But soon, my cousins and I would take our civil service
exams, and if all went well, we’d be moving to the capital for
the second and third testing rounds, leaving half our savings
behind for Uncle Fan and Auntie So. I pictured them sitting
in the dark, stretching out the last bags of rice into thin soup.
“Six hundred,” I said.
Old man Gou scoffed. “I heard you were charging five
hundred last week.”
“Last week, gold was worth more.”
“How dare you—”
“If you don’t like it, find someone else.”
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 There was no one else, and he knew it. Alchemists who
could repair broken toys or heal skinned knees were easy to
find, but experimenting with life alchemy—or soliciting it—
was punishable by death.
Old man Gou glared back at me, probably unsure if I would
truly walk away from five hundred gold. But I had seen death
and decay, things far more fearsome than an angry old man,
things that Gou could never imagine in his endless, gilded life.
At last, he nodded.
“You can leave the body in the pigpen,” I said. “Come
back after dark with the money.”
His eyes narrowed, the gold f lecks knife-sharp. “I’m not
leaving my brother in a pigpen.”
“Oh, then let’s prop him up to greet customers,” I said,
rolling my eyes and standing up to move behind the counter
again. “I’m not the one who dragged a corpse here at mid-
day with nowhere to put it.”
“Can you not help me now?”
“My cousins are busy, and I need their help,” I said. “Be-
sides, you haven’t paid me yet.”
“What is it with you Fans and money?” he said. “Have you
no compassion?”
“None,” I said, taking another sip of tea. I was used to
people berating me for my prices.
“That’s why your family is so unlucky, you know,” he said,
hefting the sack onto his shoulder once more. “You all have
bad karma.”
I made sure not to change my expression, not to show him
that his words affected me. He was probably talking about my
parents. Guangzhou had been smaller back then, and every—
one had heard about the girl foolish enough to marry a for-
eigner who left her on her deathbed. Or maybe he meant
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 Auntie and Uncle, whose poor health was no secret. But our
bad fortune had nothing to do with our prices, and every-
thing to do with gold guzzlers like old man Gou.
“Buddhist morals don’t apply to an alchemist,” I said, drain-
ing my teacup and setting it heavily on the counter, “and the
devas will abandon you for this. If you want your brother
back, then I’m your new god.”
Old man Gou scoffed. “Imagine,” he said, shaking his head,
“someone like me on my knees praying to someone like you.”
That could have meant a thousand different things, but
in the end, it didn’t matter. China had long split into a great
chasm, with Gou’s family on one side and mine on the other.
“I don’t want your prayers,” I said. “I just want your
money.”

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 I found Wenshu sitting on the f loor of our bedroom among
dozens of unfurled scrolls. His eyes tracked up and down the
text, not bothering to look when I appeared in the doorway.
I could have set the roof on fire and he probably would have
kept reading until his skin started to bubble.
He went outside far less than me or Yufei, so his complex-
ion nearly matched the white of his hemp robes. Yufei and
I joked that he would make a better bride than either of us
because he was wispy as a stalk of silver grass, had soft hands,
hair that never tangled, and bathed so often that he perpetu-
ally smelled like soap beans.
“Gēgē,” I said. “We have—”
“Wait a minute,” he said. “I’m concentrating.”
His gaze stayed locked on the parchment, reading faster
than I could ever dream of. He had an irritatingly good mem-
ory, and it was probably the fifth or sixth time he’d read the
same scroll, so I didn’t feel too bad about grabbing one of
Yufei’s stray socks from the f loor, balling it up, and throw-
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 The sock bounced off his forehead. He finally looked up,
his expression f lat. “I’m studying.”
“It’s tax day,” I said. “Come with me to the tax office and
buy more tattoo ink on the way. We have a job tonight.”
“Ah.” He looked down at the scroll before him like a lover
he couldn’t bear to part with, slowly rolling it up. He’d gone
to school for a few years, but ever since business declined, he’d
had to split his time between the shop and studying on his
own. Though he wasn’t the most patient teacher, he’d man-
aged to teach Yufei and me some basic characters, and the
rest we’d learned for ourselves.
At some point that I couldn’t remember, we’d all joked
about passing the civil service exams together and moving
to the capital, Chang’an, as government workers, where we
could send Auntie So and Uncle Fan enough money to buy
ten new houses. Then one day, as we studied with only the
light of the thinnest slice of crescent moon coming through
the paper windows, we realized it was no longer a joke. We’d
spoken it aloud and slowly it had taken shape, gone from the
soft haze of a dream to something with hard edges and sharp
corners that we could hold tight in our hands. Now, in two
weeks’ time, we’d take our exams and see if our studying had
amounted to anything, or if the dream would pour through
our fingers like sand.
So, whenever we weren’t working, Wenshu and Yufei studied
Confucian classics for the bureaucratic exam, while I studied for
the alchemy exam to become one of the royal court alchemists.
I’d read every alchemy book in Guangzhou that I could
find or borrow or steal. I’d learned how alchemists were mas-
ters of the five elements, using all kinds of rocks and minerals
as catalysts to reshape the world. At first, the earliest alche-
mists’ only goal had been to create an elixir of immortality.
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 They had managed to kill five emperors with their toxic con-
coctions before they finally succeeded for Empress Wu—over
one hundred years old and still fresh as a pond lily.
Now, with their greatest dream accomplished, there was
little that modern alchemists wouldn’t attempt. They could
rend mountains in two, change the course of rivers, boil the
oceans, raze cities to ashes—nothing was impossible if you
had the right stones and were willing to pay the price.
My first text had been my father’s notes on alchemy—the
only thing he’d left for me, besides my ridiculous flowery name.
My aunt said he’d heard that alchemy was more advanced in
China than in the West, so he’d traveled along the Silk Road
with the hopes of learning our secrets. He came from the other
side of the world, from a small country called Scotia that spoke
a strange language called Gaelic, where they still thought of
alchemy as pseudoscience and myth just because they’d never
mastered it. Auntie So said my father was tall, pale, and pink-
ish like uncooked jellyfish, with coppery hair and watery blue
eyes. I still remembered the soft line of his smile, but after ten
years, my memories had grown tattered at the edges.
Because of him, I would be a great alchemist one day.
Not to make him proud, but to spite him. Because when
my mother got sick, he’d simply left and never come back.
I could still feel her stiff, withered hands in mine while she
said, Your father has gone to get help. He’ll be back any moment
now. But there was no help beyond our local healers, and as
the moon grew thin and dark in the sky, I knew he would
never return. My mother, who had never hurt anyone, who
braided my hair with orchids and picked the peppers out of
my soup for me and sang to me every night until she died,
had believed in him until her last breath.
So I had taken his notes as my own, because it was the
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 least he could give me after dumping me on Auntie So. His
research was the only advantage I could hope to have over
the schooled alchemists. He wrote half in Chinese and half
in Gaelic, which Wenshu had helped me decipher, saying it
had roots in the Slavic languages that were used along West-
ern trade routes.
It was obvious that the Scotians really had no idea what
they were doing with alchemy. My father’s notes described
unstable and overly ambitious transformations mixed with
rants about a magical elixir hidden in a mythical Penglai
Island. Sometimes, that ambition had led him to questions that
would have gotten him jailed if he’d said them in Chinese.
Why must the dead remain dead? he’d written in his last note-
book. Alchemists wield life energy for their transformations, so why
is death untouchable? Surely, with the right stone, it’s possible.
He’d focused his efforts on chicken-blood stone—a mix
of clay and bloodred quartz—as the key material in a trans-
mutation that could revive the dead. He hadn’t stayed long
enough to find out that he was right.
Putting his notes into practice had taken some trial and
error, plus a lot of screaming and praying from Auntie So
when the pig she slaughtered for dinner was suddenly alive
again in the afternoon. But the first time I’d tried it on hu-
mans, I’d realized that this was as close as I would ever get
to being a god. For a single moment after every transforma-
tion, I was no longer a poor merchant’s daughter but an art-
ist of the universe, repainting the constellations, smoothing
mountains into valleys and parting seas.
My cousins tried alchemy when we were younger, but
neither of them had been able to do much more than create
bubbling pools of sludge that smelled so sharp that we nearly
fainted from the fumes.
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 “There’s probably a genetic component,” Wenshu had said.
“Your father did it, that’s why you can.”
But I suspected that Wenshu just preferred reading scrolls
to getting his hands dirty.
“You smell like old fish,” Wenshu said, rolling up his last
scroll and setting it with reverence on his desk.
“No, I smell like purge f luid.”
“Oh, that’s much better,” he said, putting his brushes in
their drawer. I waved my hands near his face and he f linched
away. “Wash your hands, you demon.”
I jokingly reached for his pillow and he grabbed a hand-
ful of soap beans from the jar on his desk, hurling them at
my head.
“If the smell bothers you now, good luck tonight when you
actually see the body,” I said. “It’s leaking from every orifice.”
“The body isn’t standing in my bedroom touching my pil-
low,” he said, turning and pulling out the inkstone from his
desk drawer, holding it to the light, and scraping the crusted
bits from the near-empty pan. He would have to make more
before nightfall.
Yufei appeared in the doorway, holding a bundle of fabric.
Our room truly was too small for three people, and Yufei and
I were definitely too old to be sharing a room with a boy, but
unless one of us slept in the hallway, there was nowhere else
to go. Her long skirt had red dirt stains at the hem, and her
hair had fallen down from the intricate bun that Auntie So
did for her every morning.
“Why is there a body in the pigpen?” Yufei asked.
“That’s for later,” I said, gathering up the soap beans from
the f loor.
Yufei blinked but didn’t inquire further. She had such a
small range of facial expressions that neighbors whispered
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 about how she wore a porcelain mask instead of a real face.
Wordlessly, she unfolded the fabric in her arms, dumping
whitish-brown mush all over the f loor.
Wenshu made a strangled sound and backed up. After see-
ing the body that afternoon, my first thought was that I was
looking at several pounds of human fat. But death had a dis-
tinct smell, and this one was sharp and sweet.
“Sweet potatoes?” I said.
Yufei nodded. “Can you fix them?”
I nodded, moving over to my bedside drawer. “Yes, but
why did you smash them?”
“And why did you dump them all over the clean f loor?”
Wenshu said, gripping his hair.
Yufei shrugged. “Needed something heavy, and they were
already ruined,” she said, sitting down cross-legged.
“You needed something heavy while buying vegetables
two blocks away?” Wenshu said, glaring accusingly at the
mashed potatoes.
“Men are annoying,” Yufei said, as if that explained it all.
At our blank looks, she rolled her eyes and elaborated, “They
wouldn’t leave me alone and I had eggs in my other hand.”
“Oh,” I said. “You bludgeoned someone with potatoes?”
She nodded.
Quite a few men were desperate for Yufei’s hand in mar-
riage, but she was just as determined to convince them they
would be better off with a wild boar than have her for a
wife. One unfortunate suitor had slipped her a love note last
month, which she’d torn to pieces and eaten in front of him.
Another man had come to the shop to give her wild­f lowers,
which she’d tossed into the kiln. Auntie So kept telling peo-
ple Yufei was fifteen, even though she’d been fifteen for over
four years now, because she was getting embarrassingly old
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 to be unwed. But no matter how hard she tried, the well of
suitors never seemed to dry up.
Wenshu let out a massive sigh, hunched over his desk. “Did
you kill anyone?”
Yufei shook her head. “Too many witnesses. But even if I
did, Zilan could just fix him.”
Wenshu groaned and f lopped facedown onto his bed. “I
have demons for sisters.”
“All the more reason to stay on our good side,” I said,
digging through my drawer for the right stone and hiding a
small smile. Something in me always warmed when Wenshu
or Yufei called me their sister. Sure, we’d grown up together,
but I was really only their cousin. It was painfully obvious
just by looking at the three of us together—I was taller than
both of them because that was what happened when you had
a towering Scotian father. My hair had a strange coppery tint
in the sunlight, my arms and legs were so long that Auntie
So called me grasshopper, and the shoemaker told me only
men had feet so big.
When we played by the river as kids and I saw our mis-
matched ref lections rippling in the muddy water, the word
sister felt like a lie. I had not always been their sister, which
meant one day they could decide I wasn’t their sister anymore.
It was fine now, when we were all living under Auntie and
Uncle’s roof. But maybe one day, Yufei would finally meet a
man that didn’t disgust her, and Wenshu would marry because
it was the logical choice, and I would be alone. Unlike Yufei,
I wasn’t pretty enough to persuade a man to pay a dowry for
me. The fact that I was a hùnxiě—half Hàn Chinese and half
foreigner—certainly didn’t help my case. Part of me wished
all of us could be like Yufei and just pretend to never age, so
we could stay together forever.
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 I pulled three small moonstones from the drawer, warm-
ing them between my palms. Moonstone was a waterstone,
useful for healing and repairs. All the stones in the world had
different properties based on their elements—most metal­
stones could reshape other objects, earthstones were good
for transforming the mind, woodstones worked well for ma-
nipulating plant and animal life, and firestones were agents
of destruction or great change. There were still thousands of
stones with untapped uses, and even more hybrid stones that
alchemists tried to forge for more powerful reactions, like the
chicken-blood stone my father had studied.
I’d bought an old alchemy-stone manual a few years ago
for half price because it was so outdated, then taken notes in
the margins as I tried out each stone to verify what the book
said. I knew by heart how to use any stone I could find in
Guangzhou, and carried a satchel of the most common ones
with me at all times: moonstone for healing, iron for re­
shaping, amethyst for breaking.
For small repairs like this, a few moonstones would do the
trick. I held three of them in my hand, sunk my fingers into
the mashed potatoes, and closed my eyes.
The real reason I could do alchemy and my cousins couldn’t
was that they couldn’t hear the river f lowing inside them. I’d
asked them about it once and Wenshu had checked my fore-
head for a fever.
Qi—breath, energy, life—circulated through all our bodies,
an endless river inside us keeping our hearts beating, mak-
ing our lungs expand, warming the food in our stomachs.
Alchemy was about drawing the power of the natural world
into your qi. When I closed my eyes and let my breath grow
shallow, I could hear it rushing over smooth stones and golden
sands, pouring into the vast ocean of my heart.
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 My palm grew cool as it soaked up the healing properties of
the moonstone, the river inside me running cold, thin layers
of glassy ice forming across it and shattering in the current. I
breathed out a cloud of water vapor, my skin prickling with
goosebumps. Then, like an unstopped dam, the moonstone’s
energy bled out my palms and into the potatoes.
The starchy sludge grew firm beneath my hands, the skin
sealing back up, soft spots of overripeness growing firm. Five
whole sweet potatoes sat on the f loor beneath my hands.
My fingers stung as if frostbitten, one of my nails crack-
ing as I rubbed my hands together to melt away the coldness.
Whenever I called on alchemy, it bit back. That was one
of alchemy’s central principles—you cannot create good without
also creating evil. For small things like reconstructing potatoes,
the cost was negligible. For bigger transformations…it was
always a question of whether it was worth it.
“Thanks,” Yufei said, gathering up the potatoes. She
paused, raising an eyebrow as if contemplating something of
great importance. “We should do this with the food the mer-
chants throw out at the end of the day. Save some money.”
“That’s not a bad idea,” I said.
“It is absolutely a bad idea,” Wenshu said. “You want to
eat rotten fruit and spoiled meat?”
“Zilan can unspoil it,” Yufei said.
“You would lick soup off the f loor. Your standards for food
safety don’t reassure me.”
“I wouldn’t lick soup off the f loor,” I said.
“No, you would just resurrect potatoes with hands covered
in corpse juice,” Wenshu said.
“The moonstone purifies—”
“Eat what you want,” Wenshu said. “There’s a very short
list of things I would die for, and potatoes are not on it.”
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 I turned to Yufei. “You and I are on that list, but second
to his soap beans.”
Another handful of soap beans f lew across the room, rain-
ing over me and Yufei.
“Did you want me to go with you or not?” Wenshu said.
I nodded, biting back another jab. Taxes for our ward were
due at the end of every week, and it wasn’t a good idea for a
girl to walk alone to the other end of the city on a day that
everyone knew she’d be carrying money. I had cinnabar crys-
tals in my pocket that I could use to explode a thief ’s brains if
I wanted to, but it was better for our business for me to simply
walk with Wenshu and avoid conf licts altogether. He always
offered to go by himself, but I knew he didn’t have enough
of a spine to stand up to the market commandant.
“I’ll come too,” Yufei said.
“You already went out today,” Wenshu said. “Mama will
be mad if you get too tan.”
“I want rice cakes,” Yufei said, as if that would ward off
Auntie So’s anger.
Wenshu rolled his eyes and handed me a straw hat from
the hook by the door, taking one for himself as well. I didn’t
particularly care if I got tan, but I knew it would give Auntie
So one less thing to worry about. Both she and Uncle Fan had
been too sick to work lately, so if me having the complexion
of raw whitefish made them smile, I wouldn’t question it.
I grabbed the bag of gold from behind the counter while
Wenshu took out our sales ledger. We left through the side
door, locking it tight behind us and stepping out into the
sharp sunlight.

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