Being no one is a skill, and it turned out I had been practicing it my whole life without noticing.
The days took a shape. Before dawn I hauled water with the other deathwatch girls, three of them, frightened creatures who spoke to me as little as possible because the girl before me had been dismissed in disgrace and the one before her had simply vanished, and proximity to bad luck is contagious. I emptied basins. I carried the covered trays that let me change a dressing no one knew I was changing. I learned the geography of the Eastern Palace the way I had once learned a hospital — by its back corridors, its supply rooms, the hours when the halls were empty, the faces of the guards who mattered and the ones who didn't. I learned to make myself so unremarkable that ministers discussed things over my bent head as if I were a piece of furniture, which is the single most useful thing a spy can be, and which I had already been for years in a different building, standing invisible at the edge of rooms where families decided whether to let their people go.
The nights were the medicine and the danger both. Xiao Yan mended fast — faster than I'd dared hope, a body that had spent six years at war knowing exactly how to spend its strength on living once the thing killing it was gone. Within a week he could sit unaided. Within two he was doing the slow, furious, secret work of getting his body back, and I was the one who set the limits, and he was, predictably, a terrible patient, the specific kind of terrible that comes from a man used to commanding his own flesh and unused to being told by a servant girl that he would rest or he would tear the wound and undo us both.
"You're worse than the horse-tribes," he told me one night, submitting to a dressing change with poor grace.
"The horse-tribes didn't have to keep you alive afterward," I said, and he laughed, the real one, and I filed the sound away the way you save a good vital sign in a bad case.
But being no one has a cost, and I paid it in the hours I couldn't fill.
The grief came at night, when the work was done and there was nothing left to be steady for. It came in the shape of small ordinary things — the phantom weight of a phone in a hand that would never hold one again, the reflex of reaching for a light switch on a wall that held only lacquer and shadow, the specific way I used to text my brother that I was alive at the end of a shift. He would never know what had happened to me. That was the one that undid me, when it came. Somewhere in a world I could not reach, a man was reporting his sister missing, was identifying a body that would not be found, was learning to live in a house with one fewer person in it, and I could not send him a single word. And my mother — six weeks dead when I died, or however time ran between the worlds — my mother was the one loss I did not have to grieve twice, because she was gone in both directions now, and there was a terrible mathematics of mercy in that which I turned over on the bad nights and could not make come out even.
I told none of it to anyone. I had told Xiao Yan the fact of where I came from; I did not tell him the weight of it. A surgeon learns to carry her own losses out of the room so the patient never has to hold them. But he saw. He was too sharp not to. One night he watched me go still over a task, somewhere far away, and he did not ask what was wrong, which everyone always asks and which never once helped. He said, instead, quietly: "You talk about your world the way I talk about the front. Like a place full of the dead you couldn't save."
"That's exactly what it is," I said.
"I know," he said. "I have one too. You never stop carrying it. You only get stronger." A pause. "It is not the same as getting over it. Anyone who tells you it is has never lost anything worth the weight."
I looked at him then — really looked, the way I hadn't let myself — at the wreck of a man rebuilding himself in a cold abandoned palace, who had lost his mother and his health and the faith of his own father and had turned none of it into cruelty, only patience. And I understood that I had landed, of all the bodies in all the world, beside the one person in it who spoke my native language, which was not Cheng and was not English but was the grammar of people who keep other people alive and lose some of them anyway and go back to work.
The language, at least, was a gift I hadn't expected. It was my grandmother's, I'd realized — not the exact tongue but the root of it, the cadence I'd heard across a kitchen my whole childhood and let go soft because I was busy becoming useful in another one. Some nights, alone, I practiced the sounds on purpose, and it felt like holding her hand across four hundred years and a language drift I couldn't measure. She had wanted me to keep it. I had been too busy. And now it was the only thing keeping me alive, and I could not tell her, and that too went on the list of things I carried out of the room.
The near-disaster came on the fourteenth night, and it taught me how thin our lie really was.
I was changing the dressing when the barred door rattled — someone testing it, then a voice, oiled and carrying, asking after His Highness's comfort in the name of the Grand Physician. Jiang's voice answered, flat, turning it away. But in the half-second before I killed the lamp and Xiao Yan arranged himself back into a dying man, I saw how fast it could all end: a wound too clean, a body too strong, a servant girl with honey and boiled linen and no earthly reason to have either. We were one careless moment from the executioner. I had saved his life, and in doing so I had made us both into a secret that a whole palace of clever, frightened, ambitious people would kill to open.
"They'll come more often now," Xiao Yan said afterward, in the dark, when the danger had passed and my hands had stopped shaking. "As the 'curse' fails to finish me. The longer I don't die, the harder they'll look. We have bought time, you and I. We have not bought safety. There is no safety in this house. There never was, not since I was eleven years old." He was quiet a moment. "I should send you away. It would be kinder. You could disappear into the lower offices and live."
"You could," I agreed. "You won't. You need me, and you're too honest a strategist to pretend otherwise."
"No," he said. "I won't." And then, lower, in a voice I hadn't heard him use: "It is not only that I need you. But I will not say the rest of it, because you are a woman who might vanish out of this skin tomorrow as suddenly as you came into it, and I have already buried enough people to know better than to reach for one who has one foot in another world." A breath. "Sleep, Cora. We hunt in the morning."
I lay awake a long time in the servants' dark, listening to three frightened girls breathe, and I thought: I have one foot in another world, and the other one is falling, slowly, for a dead man who refuses to die. And I did not know yet which of those was the more dangerous.
