We break the lock of a minor armory because the clerk inside it always makes loud speeches about loyalty, and men who speak in paragraphs are easiest to predict. We leave the door ajar and the inventory signed as if the theft never occurred. In two days, a patrol will be accused, proof will be lacking, and discipline will be tested. The test will fail. It is not sabotage. It is subtraction.
"Is there anything you do that is not him?" Shen Yue asks softly as we walk.
I almost say yes. The bridge inside me says no.
"I am a better liar than he was," I say instead. "He told the world his plan and made it obey. I tell no one and make the plan change shape to fit my hand."
"That is not better," she says. "It is only newer."
Her honesty cuts. I am grateful for the wound.
We stop at an old shrine that became a storehouse and is trying to become a shrine again. Someone has placed a bowl of rice on the threshold. A stray dog has eaten half. Good. The gods can share.
There, scratched into the lintel, three new strokes join the old creed.
不变
看钟
先左
Unchanging.
Watch the bell.
Left first.
I lay my palm over the marks and feel the wood's surprise. It did not know it could hold orders.
"Do you think," Shen Yue says, "that he is writing to you? Or to himself?"
"Both," I answer. "He never wasted a message."
We leave before the shrine remembers too much.
Wu Shuang read three letters and pretended she hadn't.
The first was unsigned and smelled faintly of river mud. It contained a list of meeting places that would become arrests if kept. She burned it and memorized only two. The second was addressed to a child's name she hadn't used in years and contained a single ribbon, frayed at one end, the color of an autumn she didn't want back. She held it until the color looked new. The third had no words, only a torn corner of parchment embossed with an old Liang crest and a half-print of a thumb. She pressed her own thumb to it. It did not fit. Good. Some things should not.
She went to the Hall of Seals and found the old rock-stamp that had impressed nothing in generations. When she pressed it into the wax this time, the mark held: a plain swirl, like water deciding which way to turn.
A clerk cleared his throat. "Highness, we have received a … suggestion, from His Majesty, to prepare proclamations welcoming the Zhou engineers to the inner wards."
"Prepare them," she said.
"Shall we also prepare the order to expel them after a week?"
"Yes," she said.
"And which shall we proclaim?"
She smiled with her mouth closed. "The one that hurts least to reverse."
When the clerk had gone, she laid out blank paper and wrote a letter she would never send:
Father, which am I to you: a seal, a mirror, or a nail?
She lit a stick of incense. It did not catch. Good. Let Heaven learn to wait.
Zhou's counting-priests began measuring Ling An's breath from within. They placed thin bowls in courtyards that sang when no wind moved, and their scribes wrote down the music as if it were law. They walked with humility that made men feel large. They left coins under doors they had only looked at. They listened more than they spoke. The city, starved for competence, fed them questions and received numbers in answer. Numbers calm. Numbers sleep in the hand and do not bite unless you throw them.
Wu Jin read their reports and cross-wrote them with his own edicts until both documents appeared to agree. He called it negotiation. The envoy called it friendship. The ministers called it survival. The clerks called it copying. The hungry called it nothing.
At twilight, a guard brought to him a scrap of cloth tied around a bell-clapper like a child's prize. The cloth was plain. The knot was the kind a soldier learns from a father who makes everything a lesson: left-hand first, then right, then pull until it sings.
He did not untie it.
He placed it on the table beside the crown.
He watched which one moved first in the draft.
Neither did.
He laughed once, softly enough to pretend it was just a breath.
I slept in a place that remembered me. Not a home—houses rarely are, once the world has taught you how quickly doors learn other people's names. An old drill-yard. The tree still had my mark, faint, at shoulder height. I pressed my palm to it and felt a boy's impatience, warm as a fever, pulse back through the bark.