A courtier laid new parchment nearby. The grain ran the wrong way. It would tear where it should fold.
The messenger reached the Southern lines at twilight and almost fell with the horse.
They brought him before the Regent under a canopy that pretended shade. He presented the He Lian scroll: Ling An stands. The bridge holds. Wu Jin is crowned Nan He Wang. The North calls for peace while it counts its dead. The captains murmured. The Regent's face remained a lake that had learned not to show wind.
"And the second?" the Regent asked.
The messenger held out a smaller, darker seal. Old Liang wax. The Lord Protector's signet. No He Lian script at all.
Only four characters, pressed too deep: Wait for the bell.
The Regent read the crest again, not the words.
"We withdraw two days," she said to her generals. "Not more."
"But, Your Grace—"
"Two days," she said. "We march on the third whether Heaven speaks or not."
When the officers dispersed, the high priest bent to her ear. "What bell?"
"The one he rings when he thinks he's losing," she said.
"And who is 'he,' Highness?"
The Regent looked north until the horizon tasted like iron. "A father," she said, and wrote two letters: one to a southern captain who had once studied in Liang, and another to a woman in the north who had never forgiven gods.
At Hei Fort the Lord Protector's plan put on its boots.
Three hundred men left at midnight without leaving. Each passed through a different gate with a different name, and the river did not count them again. At dawn a mason's guild in a village nobody remembered opened their shutters and found silent coin on the sill and a sketch of a tower with no stairs.
"Second oath," the old man said to the river, resting his hand on the stone and feeling it answer in the language of weight. "If Heaven will not choose, we will choose a wall."
A courier from Ling An arrived with the ghost of a salute and the courage of a man who had already lost what fear was meant to protect. The old man broke the seal and read the letter that was not from his son.
He did not smile. He folded it. He burned the ash into a new seal.
"So," he said to the map. "You are both walking where I set the stones. Forgive me." He did not say for what.
When he closed his eyes, he saw two boys. One wanted a knife. One wanted a book. He gave both a bridge and called it country.
I listen at the wall until it hums with other people's thoughts. There is mercy in this. I can use my ears to be human again. The bridge never listens. It only knows the shortest path between questions and doors.
A girl with burned hands prays under her breath for her mother not to look at her the way the priest did. A soldier counts the cuts he has not yet had to make. A merchant repeats a number like a charm. A boy whispers An the way you say a spell to keep dogs from biting.
"Do you hear it?" Shen Yue asks.
"The city?"
"The hand moving it."
"We are all being moved," I say. "Even the river."
Her laugh is dry. "That doesn't make the river innocent."
We pass a shrine that forgot it was a shrine. Fish scales glitter where incense ash should be. A woman leaves bread and the fish open their mouths like little bells. I do not look long. When I look at wrong things long enough, they learn to look back.
At the inner gate two He Lian guards kneel as if to adjust their greaves and end up bowing without catching themselves. The older one startles, eyes wet. He says my old rank and then corrects himself to Your Excellency and then corrects himself again to nothing at all. I want to tell him to stand. I want to tell him to run. The thing inside me wants neither.
"Tonight," I say to Shen Yue when we are alone. "We cut the northern road where Zhou will lay its spine. We will not kill their engineers. We will let them work until the work hurts."
"This is not justice," she says.
"No," I say. "This is math."
"Who taught you to count like this?"
"My father," I say, and for a moment the bridge does not hum. For a moment it is just bone.
Wu Shuang stood in the Hall of Seals and lifted one that had not been touched in a generation. The lacquer stuck to her fingers. The dragon carved into its base had worn smooth where either fear or reverence had rubbed it. She pressed the seal to a blank ribbon and lifted it.
No mark. Only a clean circle where wax refused to be impressed.
She laughed once, too softly for the clerks to hear. "Even the seals have begun to choose."
"Choose what, Highness?" the chief clerk asked.
"Survivors," she said.
She took a different seal—an older one, pre-imperial, a piece of river rock smoothed to a thumbprint—and pressed it into wax. The mark held.
She sealed a letter with it and addressed no one. Then she wrote a second, addressed carefully: To the man who taught me how to breathe under water. She did not sign.
When she left the Hall, the seals turned their faces to the wall.