To Embers We Return — Chapter 30
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The shopkeeper flourished the box in her hand, smiling broadly. ‘Look at this!’ she said effusively. ‘There are no defects, as you’ll see, and it’s even still in its original packaging. This is brand new, I can assure you! What a coincidence this is. They stopped production on this line of snow globes years ago. You were so keen on them the last time you came in, but all I managed to rustle up was that single lonely specimen. They say good things come in pairs, so I thought how inauspicious it was for you to have just one of them. A few days ago, I made a run to the ruins of Lanling — risking my life, let me tell you — and managed to dig my way into an abandoned warehouse. Luckily my eyes were sharp enough to spot this snow globe, and it just so happens to be a perfect match with the one you bought the other day. This must be fate!’
The shopkeeper might be too busy making a living to pay much attention to current affairs, but even though she didn’t seem to know who Bian Jin and Shen Ni were, she could easily tell that the pretty stranger in front of her must be her erstwhile customer’s wife. She reached past Bian Jin and offered the snow globe directly to Shen Ni.
When Shen Ni opened the box and saw the snow globe, a surge of emotion went straight to her heart.
Inside its miniature world, flurries of fine white sand fell over a tiny cottage. Outside stood a family of three, building a fire together. Their features were indistinct, but they looked like the very picture of happiness.
As Shen Ni gazed silently into the snow globe, she felt as if she were a child again.
Since the age of four,[1] Shen Ni had been aware that she was an orphan, a foundling whom Bian Jin had come across on the perilous mountain peak that bordered Shuangji Hall to the west. As more time passed, it became clear that Shen Ni was a very precocious little girl. While other children of the same age were still wetting their beds and waking up crying in the middle of the night, she was already pondering the mysteries of her own birth.
‘Shijie, did my parents not want me?’ she asked Bian Jin one day. ‘Why did they leave me?’
Bian Jin had never been particularly good at offering comfort, and this incident provided ample proof of it. She racked her brains for a good long while, trying to work out a response to Shen Ni’s question. Finally she said, ‘Perhaps it’s not that they didn’t want you. Perhaps they’re dead, just like my parents.’
‘Oh,’ said Shen Ni. None of the gloom lifted from her mood. For the next two days, no trace of a smile crossed her pretty little face. Bian Jin allowed her to skip her usual helping of spinach at dinner, but even that did nothing to cheer her up.
Bian Jin wanted to get Shen Ni some small plaything to lift her spirits. She begged their shizun to open Shuangji Hall’s front gates, then run some three miles to a cluster of nearby towns. She’d wandered through each of them until she finally found something she thought her shimei would like.
When she’d presented the snow globe to Shen Ni, the little girl had hugged it to her chest and gazed at it for such a long time that she quite forgot to eat dinner.
‘Shijie,’ said Shen Ni, pointing into the snow globe, ‘do you think if my parents were still alive, the three of us would be just like this family here? Would they keep me by their side always?’
Having upset her shimei once, Bian Jin was determined to comfort her properly this time. ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘You’re such an adorable little girl, I’m sure your parents would cherish you always, and treat you like the apple of their eye.’
Shen Ni broke into a smile, then the brightness in her eyes quickly dimmed again.
‘Shijie, it’s so nice of you to say these things to try and cheer me up. I’m not sad anymore, really I’m not. Whether my parents really are dead, or whether they’ve simply abandoned me, I have you now. As long as I can stay with you always, that’s good enough for me.’
They’d both been so young and innocent then. There had been no estrangement between them, no lustful desires to get in the way. They’d simply been two souls clinging to each other against a turbulent world.
Shen Ni remembered perfectly well, of course, exactly which of them had disrupted that comfortable equilibrium by wanting more. She did not know if Bian Jin had ever resented her for it. But what she did know was, the snow globe Bian Jin had given her all those years ago was lost to the mists of time. In her pain at Bian Jin’s rejection, she’d left it behind at Shuangji Hall. But now, Bian Jin had found something of the lost warmth they’d shared, and was offering it to her.
Bian Jin stole a glance at Shen Ni’s profile. Her shimei’s eyes were red-rimmed, and a little moisture clung to her eyelashes. Bian Jin looked away again quickly, but a faint smile still crept up the corners of her lips.
The longer Shen Ni looked at the snow globe, the more she liked it. It was a simple, old-fashioned plaything, no match for the ever-evolving array of digital toys favoured by young people in the present day. Shen Ni had seen her fair share of these devices — some fascinating, some downright bizarre. If she were to try her hand at crafting one, it would take her barely any effort at all to come up with a best-selling toy. But now, what she wanted most of all was this clumsy token of Bian Jin’s affection.
‘May I have this please?’ she asked, looking expectantly at Bian Jin. All her usual slyness was gone from her eyes. Now she looked like an innocent puppy who’d never had a wicked thought in her life, waiting eagerly for Bian Jin to indulge her.
Bian Jin could never resist Shen Ni when she looked at her like that. ‘Of course,’ she replied. ‘I meant to buy it for you anyway.’
Having successfully concluded the deal, the shopkeeper was smiling even more broadly than ever. She enveloped the snow globe in multiple layers of wrappings, tucked it into a paper bag, and handed it to Shen Ni. Shen Ni thanked her, then she and Bian Jin left the shop together.
Outside, the sun was setting, and the clouds looked as if they were afire. Lights began to come on in the houses that lined the street. The night-time traders were setting up their stalls, and crowds were beginning to gather.
Shen Ni looped the handles of the paper bag around her wrist and cradled the bag itself in both hands, as if she feared it might vanish. The two of them walked along silently for a short while. Then, as they were about to step through the main entrance of the antiques market, Shen Ni asked, ‘What happened to the snow globe you bought the last time? Why didn’t you give it to me in the end?’
Although they weren’t holding hands, this time Bian Jin had remembered to adjust her stride to Shen Ni’s, and the two of them walked together in perfect step.
‘It got smashed, so I decided not to mention it to you.’
‘Was that on the night of the Shangyuan Festival? The night you got hurt?’
Bian Jin wasn’t surprised that Shen Ni had jumped unerringly to the right conclusion. Her shimei had always been exceptionally quick. She had no choice but to admit it. ‘Mm.’
‘And how exactly did you get hurt that night?’
Shen Ni had already gathered that Bian Jin had misunderstood the nature of her relationship to Diwu Que that night, and had even contrived to explain the truth of the matter to Bian Jin without saying it in so many words. Bian Jin had nothing to hide from her now, so she recounted what had happened on the night of the Shangyuan Festival after she’d left the Directorate.
‘…then the snow globe was knocked to the ground, and it shattered into pieces. I also felt, since you’re all grown up now, you probably wouldn’t care for a childish little toy like that anyway.’
‘What I loved when I was younger, I still love now,’ said Shen Ni.
The directness of her remark threw Bian Jin completely off her stride. Quietly, she managed to readjust her pace to Shen Ni’s without drawing too much attention to that fact.
As the two of them left the antiques market by its main entrance, Dou Xuanji and Fang Pan came rushing frantically out of its side gate. ‘It must be nearby,’ said Dou Xuanji, looking down at her digital watch. The red dot that signalled danger was close to their location. It flashed, now strongly, now weakly.
A few days ago, Dou Xuanji had sent the clutch of half-dead box jellyfish she’d collected after the battle to the Supreme Bureau of Research and Innovation. The researchers there had found traces of the Black Box virus in their cores. Li Shan had worked day and night without rest to devise something completely new: a container lined with shielding capacitors, capable of imprisoning trace amounts of the Black Box virus within it. This she had installed into the machine that ran Chang’an’s city-wide tracking system. Even if the Black Box had evolved — which might account for why it had seemingly been able to infiltrate the city without triggering any alarms — this upgrade meant that the tracking system should, once again, be able to detect any signs of the virus, and to lock in accurately on its location. From the Supreme Bureau of Research and Innovation where it sat, the machine could monitor the movements of the Black Box in real time.
Li Shan also ordered a digital watch to be issued to every single Lijing official, each with a similar tracking device embedded inside it. These watches did not have anything close to the tracking system’s powerful multi-core CPU, so their capabilities were much more limited. Their effective range was only thirty-five feet, and they could not detect the Black Box across greater distances. If an instance of the virus did appear within range of one of these watches, a red light would flash and it would begin to beep.
‘Of course, I can’t guarantee that these will work in all cases,’ Li Shan had said as the watches were handed out. ‘All I can say is that they give us an additional safeguard. You should still carry out your investigations in the usual way.’
Dou Xuanji and Fang Pan had been in the midst of making their enquiries down a warren of residential streets when their watches began beeping. A faint red dot flashed on their displays like an erratic heartbeat. The Black Box was now within thirty-five feet of them!
Dou Xuanji immediately sounded the alarm to the Director of the Lijing Bureau and her fellow officials. Then she and Fang Pan followed the flashing red dot all the way to the side gate of the antiques market. As they sped along, Dou Xuanji’s eyes were fixed on her watch; she didn’t look where she was going.
The upshot of this was that she collided heavily with someone right in the middle of her headlong charge. The other person held themselves so unyieldingly that it felt like running into a stone wall. The impact sent a jolt through her whole body, and she stumbled half a step backwards. Had Fang Pan not caught her in time, she would have landed rump-first on the ground. The next moment, she heard a crack: a bowl of soup noodles piled high with layers of beef had shattered from the force of the collision, and the pieces rained down in front of her.
The hand that had been holding the bowl was still outstretched. It belonged to none other than Li Si, the commander-in-chief of the Jinwu Guards whom Dou Xuanji had already had a run-in with before — and the person she’d just slammed into. The meal which Li Si had just been about to dig into now lay in pieces on the street, mingled with dust and dirt.
Li Si had also been run off her feet for the last few days. She’d just finished searching every single house along one of the residential streets, and now she was practically starving. She’d had nothing to eat or drink all day since she woke up, and had just managed to eke out a few precious moments to fill her stomach. But before she could get so much as a sniff at her delicious dinner, it had been knocked over unceremoniously — and the culprit was none other than that loathsome dog from the Lijing Bureau, Dou Xuanji.
Li Si flicked the remnants of the soup from her hands, and let out a snort of exasperated laughter. ‘Well, well, well. It seems that dogs do have good noses, the way you keep sniffing around me for trouble when I’m at my most aggravated. I’ve said before, if some mangy cur ever dares get in my way again, it’s in for a beating—’
Even before Li Si had finished speaking, Dou Xuanji was already sprinting past her, paying her no more heed beyond a silent sneer: she’s a fool and a rogue.
Dou Xuanji had barely gone any distance, however, when Li Si caught hold of her by the wrist and hauled her bodily backwards, bringing them nose to nose with each other.
‘Who said you could go?’ snarled Li Si, her sharp eyes glinting with a lethal edge. Her grip tightened so forcefully around Dou Xuanji’s wrist that the latter found it impossible to break free. The sound of Dou Xuanji’s bones breaking echoed around them with shocking clarity.
The very next moment, however, Dou Xuanji had a dagger in her hand and was pointing it straight at Li Si’s throat. With the finely-honed instincts of a warrior who spent her days walking the cliff-edge between life and death, she’d whipped it out of its sheath even before Li Si had laid a hand on her. The sharp tip of the dagger pressed against Li Si’s skin; with just a little more force, Dou Xuanji would be able to split her throat open from ear to ear.
‘Do I need to ask your permission to stay or go?’ said Dou Xuanji, turning her head slightly so that she could stare Li Si right in the eye. Her own gaze was cold and unyielding.
The tension between them had risen to fever pitch; they looked as if they could come to blows at any moment. Fang Pan and some of Li Si’s subordinates hurried over to pry them apart. Both Dou Xuanji and Li Si were warriors of extraordinary ability; if they did take it into their heads to start a fight, they might very well end up tearing the whole of the Eastern Market into pieces.
‘We’re all colleagues here, there’s no need to take offence over something like this,’ urged one of Li Si’s subordinates.
‘Let’s calm down, and save our strength for all the houses we’ve got left to search,’ said Fang Pan.
With great difficulty, they finally managed to separate Dou Xuanji and Li Si from each other. Dou Xuanji managed to stop herself from glancing at her half-broken wrist, but Li Si had no way of concealing the thin line of blood seeping from her throat.
Li Si snatched up a handful of napkins from the noodle stall, scrubbed them hastily over the wound, and tossed the wad over her shoulder. It landed unerringly in the rubbish bin next to the stall. ‘Make sure I don’t ever catch you alone on the streets of Chang’an,’ she warned, with an insouciant tilt of her head. ‘Otherwise you’re in for a world of pain.’ Her eyes travelled meaningfully over Dou Xuanji’s icy features, settling finally on the other woman’s titanium neck.
Dou Xuanji had no interest in continuing to match her wits or strength against Li Si. Nothing was more important to her than tracking down the Black Box. After that run-in, however, the already feeble red dot had vanished completely from her watch. She and Fang Pan immediately hurried off in the direction their watches had been pointing them towards earlier.
At this point, lights had already come on all across the city. There was no curfew in Chang’an, so its night life was in full swing. The residents of the city, who had grown up in the midst of ceaseless war, had mastered the art of numbing themselves against pain and fear. Even if the shadow of the Black Box were to fall over the continent once more, what of it? If they were destined to die tomorrow, that was all the more reason to drink and carouse until dawn. The streets were filled with pleasure-seekers; the crowds grew denser and denser as the night lengthened.
Dou Xuanji found herself squeezing through a knot of drunken revellers. As she shoved them out of the way, she nearly knocked over a woman who was carrying a child in her arms.
Fang Pan reached out swiftly to steady the woman. The woman seemed about to say something — then her eyes fell on the blood-red resurrection lilies on their left shoulders. Instantly she shrank into silence and scurried away. No one could afford to offend the officials of the Lijing Bureau.
‘Watch your step, Xuanji,’ said Fang Pan. ‘Is your wrist broken? Do you want to go and get that treated first?’
The pain was making Dou Xuanji even more short-tempered than usual, and she’d broken out into a hot sweat. But there was no time for such trifles now. ‘I’ll take care of it later,’ she said. ‘Let’s go.’
By the time they’d taken a turn through the Eastern Market, Dou Xuanji’s face had gone deadly pale. The red dot was flashing on their watches again. The Black Box was very close by, but somehow they couldn’t track it down.
Dou Xuanji stood amidst the bright lights and buzzing crowds of nighttime Chang’an. The glow from the lamps washed across her features like so many ghostly flames. Every face she looked upon seemed suspicious to her, but she had no idea which of them the Black Box might be lurking in.
Thud— thud— came the sound of someone kicking at a chair.
A noise as mundane as this would not usually have drawn Dou Xuanji’s attention. But when she looked round and caught sight of Bian Jin and Shen Ni, a fresh burst of energy cut through the the muddle of her thoughts.
Shen Ni and Bian Jin were sitting at one of the tables outside a tavern, meaning to warm themselves with some wine before making their way home. They’d only just sat down when the small child behind Bian Jin began kicking the back of her chair.
The child was the very same one whose mother Dou Xuanji had nearly knocked over earlier. The two of them were well-known to everyone who frequented this part of the Eastern Market. The woman was the owner of the tavern, and the child was her only family. He was both deaf and mute, and she’d only just bought him a new prosthetic ear. Now she was saving up for a prosthetic larynx. There was no one else to look after the child, so he was usually in the tavern with her as she poured wine and served customers. Her regulars would often help keep an eye on him.
The tavern was just beginning to grow busy, and the woman had her hands full. At some point her son had crept out unnoticed from behind the counter and climbed onto the chair behind Bian Jin. Now he was kicking away rhythmically at the back of hers.
Bian Jin turned to look at him, her face cool and impassive.
The child was short, with stubby limbs, and his hair was gathered into a single pigtail at the top of his head.[2] His cheeks were crimson from the wind; the skin was so dry that cracks were beginning to show. Bian Jin’s stare did not seem to frighten him in the least. He pointed a chubby forefinger at her, his face splitting into a broad grin.
Many of the passersby turned to look at them, their glances darting between Bian Jin and the child, waiting to see how this would play out. After all, Bian Jin’s icy demeanour was rather terrifying.
The child, however, was completely unafraid. Still pointing at her, he went on kicking the back of her chair with even greater gusto.
His mother was just bringing some wine to another table. Seeming to sense that something was wrong, she looked up, saw what was happening, and hurried apologetically towards Bian Jin.
The next moment, Shen Ni had risen from the seat opposite Bian Jin’s, her silver-white battlestaff in hand. She swung it at the child, shattering his skull into pieces. A jet of blood splattered onto the woman’s face. She froze mid-step, staring blankly at the ruins of her son’s head on the ground, and let out a disbelieving whimper.
A hush fell over the onlookers. They’d been expecting to see some fun, but not this. The child had been a little annoying, perhaps, but surely nowhere near enough to have his head stoved in?
Shen Ni was gazing coolly at the child’s decapitated body. Without breaking her stare, she stuffed the snow globe into a pocket of her outer robe and zipped it all the way up. ‘Mistress Dou, Mistress Fang,’ she called out, ‘disperse the crowd.’
Dou Xuanji and Fang Pan did not respond immediately, so taken aback were they by the sudden turn of events.
The bystanders were still staring at the scene in shock when the fragments of the child’s skull began pulling themselves upright.
It was as if some hidden force were summoning them to a particular spot, compelling the torn flesh and pieces of bone to knit themselves back together. In a few moments, the child’s head had finished reassembling itself. It sprang high into the air and spun around, revealing a grinning visage once more. But this time, its features were all jumbled up, and the hair on its head was dishevelled and sparse. The face looked like a ball of modelling clay that had been kneaded and squashed and pummelled every which way by some mischievous youngster. Black tentacles had sprouted out where the child’s neck should have been; they waved merrily in the air.
Aghast, the onlookers turned and fled, elbowing each other out of the way.
A white-haired old man in his seventies was one of the stragglers. He had a prosthetic eye and a prosthetic leg, but both were broken, and he was too poor to have them repaired. That, together with his advanced age, slowed him down considerably. The child’s head whirled through the air and settled on top of the old man’s skull, which it began swiftly to absorb. Soon, the child’s face had melded together with the old man’s prosthetic eye, so that it looked as if two heads were sprouting out of the latter’s wizened body. The old man’s own head was shunted to one side, displaced by this new, invasive growth. It let out a plaintive howl, its features twisting in agony.
The child’s face had fused partially with the old man’s, but it still retained a mind of its own. Its eyes darted nimbly from side to side, as if it had made a new and fascinating discovery. Then it turned to the woman, and spoke to her excitedly in the old man’s croaking voice. ‘Mama, I can talk now!’
The woman was already reeling with panic. At the sound of her ‘son’s’ voice, her knees crumpled and her mind became a complete blank.
The freakish creature jabbed the old man’s dirt-encrusted finger at Bian Jin, in exactly the same way as the little boy had been pointing at her mere moments ago. ‘Mama, I want this one! Mama, I want to eat this one!’
Dou Xuanji and Fang Pan, their nerves tense to breaking point, exchanged a covert glance. The creature wanted to eat… Bian Jin?
The woman stood rooted to the spot, not daring to utter a single word.
The creature let out a petulant huff, then drew a knife from a sheath at the old man’s waist. ‘Mama!’ it roared, and flung the blade at the woman’s face.
The old man had been one of the army of outsourced janitorial workers contracted by the Department of Sanitation. Chang’an was in the throes of a rat infestation, which was why he carried the knife with him. It had been designed specifically for killing rats: at a press of a trigger, it would release a smell that they found particularly enticing, and it was wickedly sharp besides, capable of despatching a rat with a single strike.
The knife traced an arc of sharp white light through the air — then suddenly Shen Ni was there, her battlestaff raised to block its progress. The two weapons struck each other in a cloud of coruscating sparks, and the knife was sent spinning off in a different direction.
Shen Ni’s eyelashes had been singed slightly by the sparks. She glanced towards the child’s decapitated body, which was slumped against the table at which he had been sitting. A faint, misty black thread extended from what remained of its jaw to the head that was now attached to the old man’s body.
Shen Ni had spent the last three years battling the Black Box in the north. Whenever she encountered a creature that was possessed by the virus, she would smash its skull in, then remove its tainted jade core or inner core. That was the only sure way of despatching it for good. She’d never seen a black thread like this before. It looked a little fuzzy and indistinct, but even without testing it, her machinist’s intuition told her that it was a preposterously powerful energy field, capable of keeping its victims’ bodies moving even after their heads had been smashed in — and of regenerating any damage they had suffered.
The Black Box virus had evolved.
Before the child’s mother could even scream, some irresistible force had picked her up by the collar and deposited her into a chair in a corner of her own tavern that was furthest from the commotion. Quaking, she looked up to see that it was Bian Jin who had carried her to safety.
Bian Jin looked down at her sweat-drenched face, her makeup stained and smeared by tears she could not hold back. It took Bian Jin a long while to come up with something that might provide the woman in front of her with some shred of comfort.
‘I’ll do my very best to bring you back his head,’ she promised.
The woman had been barely clinging on to sanity. At the word ‘head’, all her pent-up grief rushed straight to her heart. Her eyes rolled back in her skull, and she slumped unconscious onto the table before her.
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Footnotes:
- In the original text, 开蒙 (pinyin: kaimneg), literally ‘enlightenment’. This refers to the age at which children traditionally began their education, normally at four years of age. [return to text]
- In the original text, 冲天辫 (pinyin: chongtian bian). An upward-pointing pigtail worn by small children, both historically and in the present day. [return to text]
douqi 随笔 