Chapter 5: The Second Beat

On Wednesday morning, Su Yue brought Shen Mo a cup of coffee and the dead man's hand.

The hand was a photograph. The coffee was less convincing.

"Black," she said. "Nothing added."

Mo lifted the paper cup. Bitter steam touched his face. Mei Lin watched from the tablet at the end of the interview table, prepared to translate, though he understood more of Su's speech than he had the day before.

He drank.

The taste filled his mouth with burned seed and hot metal.

Hollis sat beside the door with his own cup and watched him drink, as if waiting for a verdict. Mo did not give one.

Su placed the photograph in front of Mo. Price's right hand lay open beneath white morgue light. A dark grain marked the skin near his thumb.

"You recognize the wrapping," she said. "You recognize the box. Who owned it?"

Mo set down the coffee.

"Su Qingyue."

Su did not move, but the pen in her hand stopped above the page.

"Su?"

"Her family name. The same sound as yours."

"Related to you?"

"No."

Her pen resumed. "The name you called me when I entered the records room."

"I was mistaken."

"Who was she?"

"A physician."

"At Origin Gate?"

"In the Hall of Returning Breath."

"What was she to you?"

Mo looked at the cuff around his wrist. They had fastened it again that morning. Its steel held no threat, but the choice to remain did not make its touch pleasant.

"I will not answer."

Lin translated. Su's pen tapped the pad once.

"Did the medicine box belong to her?"

"She made it."

"Made it herself?"

"She chose the wood. A carpenter built the cabinet. She fitted the drawers and prepared what they held."

"Why was Nolan Price carrying it?"

"I do not know."

"How did it survive?"

"I do not know."

"Is Qingyue alive?"

White jade closed over his throat. Qingyue's fingers twisted in his robe. Her chest rose once beyond the light.

Mo kept his hand open on the table.

"I do not know."

Su studied him. Her eyes were Qingyue's eyes in shape alone. Qingyue had examined wounds with an attention so complete that pain seemed briefly ashamed of itself. Su's attention pressed for weakness, tested silence, and waited for the part a person meant to hide.

She gathered the photographs.

"Dr. Desai has Price at the county morgue. You told us his body carried the shape of the hand that killed him."

"It does."

"Show us."

The dead were kept beneath a building that smelled of disinfectant, chilled air, and machinery.

Mo disliked it less than the holding room.

Desai waited beside a steel table. Price lay covered to the shoulders, the examination of his chest concealed beneath a clean sheet. Hollis remained near the door. Su stood at Mo's left, close enough to reach the chain fixed between his wrists.

Mei Lin's voice came from a tablet on a counter.

Desai pointed at the floor beside the table. "He stays there. No contact unless I approve it."

Mo understood the gesture before the words reached him.

He stopped.

Price's qi had dispersed. Death released the coherence of breath and flesh, and this thin world gave nothing back. Yet a pressure remained beneath the breastbone, narrow as five needles laid through the body.

The killer's force had entered without marking skin. It had divided under the ribs, followed their inner curve, then gathered behind the heart.

Origin Gate had taught that passage.

In winter, novices knelt before fired-clay tiles covered by single sheets of paper. A palm had to break the tile without tearing the paper. Too much force failed. Too little failed. A careless student bruised the surface and learned nothing about what lay beneath it.

The paper over Price's heart would have remained whole.

The tile had been crushed to powder.

Mo drew one breath. The residue sharpened, and something else moved inside it.

He closed his eyes.

A black-armored soldier sagged beneath his fingers. A pulse beat at the man's neck, then another rhythm scraped beneath it, hot and foreign. Stolen qi caught in damaged channels. Fragments of other bodies turning against one another.

The same corruption clung to Price.

Time had thinned it, more time than he could yet measure. It had changed carriers, hands, perhaps languages. It remained foul in the same place.

Mo stepped toward the table.

Su caught his wrist.

The grip was firm, trained, and warm. A pale scar crossed the base of her thumb. Her knuckles bore old marks that no physician's work had put there.

She looked down at the point of contact, then up at his face.

"I said no touching."

"I need his hand."

"Ask."

The word required no translation.

Mo looked toward Desai. "I ask to examine it."

Desai considered him, then opened a box of blue gloves. "Through these. Detective Su controls your hands."

Su released his wrist only to pull a glove over his right hand. The material caught across his fingers. She worked it down with short tugs, her grip practical and without apology.

Mo watched the concentration gather between her brows.

Qingyue had never touched him so.

Su finished at his wrist. "One hand. Where I can see it."

Mo went to the table.

Desai uncovered Price's right arm. The dead fingers had been cleaned, but a dark stain remained in the crease near the thumb. Mo lowered his gloved fingertips until they hovered above it.

Cold pressure reached him before contact.

He touched the hand.

The residue had not entered through the skin there. Price had brushed against a prepared substance, something bitter with camphor and sharpened by powdered metal. It had caught the killer's qi and held it after death as oil held smoke.

Beneath the metallic trace, several faint currents pulled in different directions. One broke short at the wrist. Another surged and collapsed near the shoulder. They had been forced into one circulation without ever becoming whole.

Mo withdrew his fingers.

"Whoever struck him carried qi taken from other bodies."

Lin translated into the morgue's mechanical hum.

Hollis lowered his cup.

Desai folded her arms. "Taken how?"

"I do not know."

"You can detect this through a glove."

"The glove is thin."

"And I can't detect it with imaging, chemistry, microscopy, or any instrument in this building."

"I do not know your instruments."

"Then for now it is not evidence."

Su moved closer to the table. "What can her instruments find?"

Mo pointed to the stain.

"The metal. The medicine carrying it. Perhaps blood, if blood was used."

Desai glanced toward the specimen cabinet. "We saved the grain from his hand."

"Keep it cold."

"It is cold."

"Colder than this room."

Desai's expression sharpened. "Why?"

"Heat will loosen what it carries."

"What temperature?"

Mo looked at the steel drawers set into the wall. Their cold came in even pulses from hidden machinery.

"I do not know your numbers."

Desai made a note. "Then I will choose the temperature and record that the choice was mine."

She crossed to the specimen cabinet and removed a sealed vial. A black grain rested at the bottom, no larger than a seed.

Even through glass, its pressure touched him.

The false second beat.

Mo's cuff chain went taut. Su had taken hold of it before he noticed himself moving.

"You've encountered this before," she said.

Mo looked at the vial.

"I have."

"Where?"

"At Origin Gate."

"When?"

"The night it fell."

The room held only the machinery for several breaths.

Su turned toward Hollis. "Give us the room."

He looked at Mo, then at the chain in her hand.

"Yue."

"He opened your cuffs yesterday and stayed in his chair."

"That isn't the reassuring argument you think it is."

"Five minutes."

Hollis left with Desai. The door closed behind them. Mei Lin remained on the tablet, her face composed and her eyes lowered as if privacy could be manufactured by courtesy.

Su set the vial back in its rack.

"Price was killed with a method from your home."

"A damaged piece of one."

"The substance on his hand carries the same thing you found at Origin Gate."

"The same corruption. Fainter."

"Was it on Qingyue?"

Mo's attention returned to her face before he could stop it.

The white light flattened the color from her skin. A strand had worked loose from the knot at her nape and lay against her cheek. A beauty mark rested beneath her left eye. Qingyue's eyes. Qingyue's mouth. Qingyue's jaw held now with a living woman's anger.

"No," he said.

"What happened to her?"

"I will not answer."

"Did she die at Origin Gate?"

He said nothing.

Su released the cuff chain. "You want my evidence. You want access to Price, the wrapping, and whatever we recover from that box."

"I do."

"You give me half an explanation and decide the rest belongs to you."

"It does."

"Then keep it."

She stepped between Mo and the table. Close now. He could smell coffee on her breath beneath the clean chemical air. Her chin lifted, and the line of her throat moved with a quick swallow.

"Stop looking at me like a corpse."

Lin's translation followed a heartbeat later.

Mo lowered his eyes.

Su put two fingers beneath his chin and raised it again.

"I didn't tell you to look away."

Her knuckles rested against his skin. The touch was lighter than the hold on his wrist and harder to endure.

Mo met her gaze.

The other face was still there behind hers, and her order did not send it away. But Qingyue had never stood beneath white morgue light with a badge at her belt, watching to see whether he would respect a boundary simply because she had made it.

"Who am I?" Su asked.

"Su Yue."

Her fingers stayed beneath his chin.

"Again."

"Su Yue."

She let him go.

Mo kept his eyes on hers.