The cell remembered every breath it had swallowed. Stone sweated; iron tasted itself; the torchlight bowed as if the flame had been taught courtesy in another country.
Wu Kang sat unbound. Chains insult men already divided. His wrists were raw where rope had taught the skin its lesson, but his jaw held the same old arithmetic—add pride, subtract pain, divide by hate, carry nothing.
"You came," he said, smiling through the split in his lip. "Did the silence drag you down here, or did you walk because it asked nicely?"
I did not answer. The torches bent toward me, a fraction of a flame's width. Shen Yue stood in the doorway, one foot inside, one out, as if her body had chosen different loyalties for each shoe. She had argued against this visit. She was right to. I came anyway.
"You said the Emperor sleeps," I said. My voice struck the walls and did not echo. "Where?"
Wu Kang tilted his head, listening the way a wolf listens to snow decide to fall. "You ask like a tide now," he murmured. "Not like a man. Tides don't bargain."
"Answer," I said.
His eyes—our father's eyes when they were young enough to be cruel—glittered. "South."
The word slid across the wet stones like a fish that had learned roads. Shen Yue's fingers tightened on the doorframe; wood creaked a little, surprised to be asked to keep secrets.
"Say it without games," I told him.
"They have him," he said, almost tender, as if describing a child that had fallen asleep on the wrong lap. "Not bandits. Not courtiers. Priests. The clean sort. The ones who count."
"The South," I said. The silence under my ribs stirred, pleased to hear its own name said at a distance.
He nodded. "The same halls that measured our cousin until she forgot the shape of her childhood." His smile grew smaller and sharper at the edges. "Do you remember how she walked when she returned? How the air tilted to look? How she answered questions as if she were telling the weather how it should behave? That is what waits for the Son of Heaven. They will give him back. But not to us."
I stepped closer until the torchlight put us in the same shadow. "How do you know this?"
"Because I gave him to them," he breathed, and the room cooled by a season.
Shen Yue's breath caught. Even the guttering flame paused, as if reconsidering combustion.
"When I took him from the palace," Wu Kang said, voice steady as an executioner's hand, "I did not bury him under our walls like a treasure no one is allowed to spend. I traded him for time. Better a southern cage than your butcher's square. Better a prayer you do not control than a knife you cannot stop."
I took his jaw in my hand. Bone. Heat. He did not look away. "You sold your Emperor."
"I saved my realm," he hissed between his teeth. "From you."
We were close enough to share breath, if men like us shared anything but ruin. The silence under my ribs rose, cresting, a great animal turning under black water. The torches leaned so far the flames began to speak a new grammar.
Shen Yue stepped in, the sword not drawn, the thought of it drawn. "If this is true," she said, voice thin and exact, "then the South will not wait. They will march with him, not hide him."
"They will carry him like a shrine," Wu Kang said, satisfied to hear someone else speak his prophecy. "Banners, bells, incense that smells like the sea left in a bowl too long. They will lift their god with clean hands, and your people—" he nodded toward me, toward the stone, toward the part of me that listened from behind my bones "—will look up and wonder whether their knees are supposed to remember old shapes."
"How many priests," I asked. "Which river. What hall."
"If I told you the names," Wu Kang said softly, "you would pretend not to recognize them. Because one of them taught your cousin to sit very still inside circles drawn in ash. Because one of them wrote me a letter when I still had both hands clean."
"You never had both hands clean," I said.
He laughed. It sounded like a whetstone learning to sing. "I had them clean enough to hold the Emperor without flinching. That is more than you can say now."
I let go of his jaw. Blood had marked my glove in a neat crescent. I looked at the mark. It looked back.
"Why say this now?" I asked. "Why not keep it until the noose bows?"
"Because I want to watch," he said, eyes suddenly honest. "I want to see which of us the world chooses to break first. I want a seat when the South brings you your sovereign with a new spine and asks you to kneel to it. I want to see whether the thing inside you loves roofs enough to drown rivers."
The silence under my ribs laughed without sound. It liked the idea of choices that were not really choices.