Dawn crawls over Pezijil. Smoke stains the sky in purple bruises, thickest above the outer districts where yesterday’s “minor unrest” becomes today’s blackened clouds. The bells of the city towers ring anyway—out of habit, out of pride. Half of them ring off-key.

  On the river, barges idle under armed watch, their hulls nudging the pilings with the soft, impatient bump of animals kept from food. Oars dip once, twice, then stop. Men with halberds stand on decks and pretend they are statues. Their eyes keep moving. Their hands keep sweating. A banner flaps weakly, damp with mist and ash, and the bright imperial colors look like someone tried to wash blood out and failed.

  A mother kneels by a makeshift stall where a sack of rice sits like a small god, guarded by three boys with spears that still smell of fresh wood. She slides two hairpins forward on the cloth: silver, delicate, shaped like plum blossoms. Her fingers hesitate a fraction of a heartbeat, then shove them harder.

  The boy running the stall is young enough to still have baby fat at his jaw. He squints at the hairpins like a professional appraiser, then says, with all the authority of someone who has discovered power is simply saying no, “One bowl.”

  She makes a sound that is not quite a laugh. “One bowl? For my wedding hair?”

  “That’s why it’s worth something,” he replies, almost apologetic. He leans in, lowers his voice. “If you want two bowls, give me the comb too.”

  Her jaw tightens. Somewhere behind her, a baby coughs—a wet, ugly sound. She slides the comb forward without looking at it.

  Two alleys away, a scholar sits in a doorway with his robes patched so many times they resemble a map of defeat. He tears pages out of a classic—beautiful brushwork, careful commentary—and stuffs them into the crack under his doorframe to stop the wind. His hands shake as he does it, either from cold or shame. He murmurs a line from the text as if reciting a prayer, then curses.

  A child squats beside a broken cartwheel and counts arrowheads as if they are marbles: one, two, three—this one is bent—four, five—this one still has a bit of someone on it. The child pauses, scrapes the dried red off with a fingernail, and resumes counting with the solemn focus of a tiny accountant.

  Above all of it, in the raw air between roofs, a voice carries—quiet, steady, learned the hard way.

  Zhou Liwei stands on a stone step that used to belong to a magistrate’s office and now belongs to whoever has the nerve to keep standing. His coat is dust-stained and too thin for the season. His hair is tied back with a strip of cloth that might once have been a banner. Around him, captains and runners and men with homemade armbands lean in, listening like hungry dogs.

  “The court thinks this is a play,” Liwei says. His voice isn’t thunder. It doesn’t need to be. “They think Pezijil is a symbol.”

  He looks down at the streets, at the bodies that haven’t been collected yet because grief has turned into scheduling.

  “It’s not a symbol today,” he says, and his mouth twists like he tastes bile. “It’s a stomach. And if the stomach empties, the whole body turns to biting.”

  Someone laughs too loudly at that—nervous, thin. Liwei doesn’t smile back.

  “Feed it,” he says. “Or it will eat us all.”

  Liwei’s people drag carts into intersections and flip them sideways. They stack paving stones until their fingers bleed and their backs turn into knots. They wedge doors ripped from aristocratic homes into gaps and nail them with bent spikes scavenged from furniture. In one alley, someone hauls a marble statue of a god down from its pedestal and uses it as a corner brace. The god’s face cracks when it hits the cobbles.

  Barricades rise where sightlines matter: at long straight streets where palace archers like to practice their cruelty, at bridges where the river narrows and men can be funneled like grain.

  Rotating sentries take shifts with whistles and hand signals. There’s no polished drill. There’s only the urgent intelligence of the cornered. A boy with a whistle learns three notes: one for “patrol,” one for “archers,” one for “run like your ancestors are watching.” An old woman with a kitchen knife stands beside him and corrects his posture like he’s her grandson and she refuses to let him die slouching.

  Captured grain is hauled into courtyards and weighed on stolen scales. Sacks get sealed with wax stolen from temples, stamped with crude marks that mean ours. A former clerk—his fingers still ink-stained—sits cross-legged beside the piles and writes tallies on scraps of paper.

  A man jogs up, face flushed with feverish excitement. He holds a torch like it’s a holy object. “Captain!” he says to Liwei, pointing wildly down the street. “The tax office. Let’s burn it. Let the worms choke on their own ledgers!”

  The crowd murmurs. The idea of flames in an administrative building is seductive.

  Liwei steps close enough that the man’s torch heat warms his cheeks. He looks at the torch, then at the man, then past him to the sacks of grain being unloaded like treasure.

  “Paper burns fast,” Liwei says.

  The man grins, already tasting it.

  “Grain burns faster,” Liwei adds, voice flat. “We’ll need to defend it.”

  The grin falters.

  Liwei’s gaze sharpens. “Granary stewards,” he says, and points at three people who look like they would rather fight than count. “You. You. You. Water captains,” he continues, and picks two boatmen with hands like rope. “You’re in charge of the wells and the barrels. Anyone steals water, I’ll make them drink from the gutter until they learn gratitude.”

  Accountability follows like a shadow. When a man is caught cutting open a sack to scoop handfuls into his own pouch.

  The thief starts to plead. “My mother—”

  “Everyone has a mother,” Liwei says. “Some of them even have food. Because they didn’t steal it.” He hands the thief a broom. “Sweep the market. Do it for three days. If you stop, we feed you to the river.”

  Someone calls, “The river is full!”

  Liwei answers without missing a beat, “Then it can have seconds.”

  ...

  Later, Liwei walks through a makeshift market that forms in the shadow of a barricade like mold. People barter onions for cloth, salt for lamp oil, a single egg for a bandage. A man tries to trade a poem for dried fish and gets punched for his optimism.

  Liwei listens to the bargaining and something in his expression twitches between pride and nausea. The city keeps moving. The city keeps chewing. He wants to weep. He wants to laugh. He wants to drag every merchant into a warm room and tell them they should not have to negotiate like this to stay human.

  Instead, he says, quietly to the captain beside him, “They’re still making prices.”

  The captain looks at him like that’s a strange thing to notice.

  Liwei’s mouth twists. “That means they still believe tomorrow exists.”

  He keeps walking, shoulders tight, as if carrying the weight of everyone’s appetite on his spine.

  ...

  The Imperial edicts arrive. Drummers beat in the main squares. Heralds read proclamations from scrolls with perfect diction.

  Curfew. Collective punishment. Districts declared “traitor neighborhoods” with a brushstroke as casual as swatting a fly.

  And then, before the sun fully climbs, the Palace Guard raids.

  They move in disciplined lines, armor lacquered, boots synchronized, faces impassive beneath helms. Their discipline is the kind of efficiency that turns men into tools and tools into nightmares.

  Doors get kicked in with rehearsed brutality. People are dragged out by hair and collar. Bodies appear in doorways like dropped sacks. Some are posed on purpose—knees bent, arms splayed.

  Heads go up on poles at intersections. The poles are placed where the crowd must pass to reach water. The faces sag in the morning light, mouths open as if still trying to speak.

  Houses are marked with chalk: a white line on the lintel, a symbol on the door. A woman stands in the street watching a guard draw the mark on her neighbor’s home. She says, in a voice too calm, “Chalk’s expensive.”

  The guard doesn’t look at her. He finishes the mark with a flick, as if signing a receipt.

  ...

  Inside the palace, the air smells of lacquer and incense. The floors gleam. The walls are painted with idyllic mountains where nothing ever burns. A fountain trickles as if mocking the city’s thirst.

  Sima sits with his sleeves immaculate, fingers folded as if in prayer. Old Ji stands like a carved pillar, jaw tight, eyes bright with a soldier’s impatience.

  “Let the outer districts break first,” Sima says softly, voice gentle enough to soothe a child. “If the city must crack, it cracks away from the Imperial City.”

  Old Ji’s mouth tightens. “If we feed everyone, we feed rebellion.”

  Sima inclines his head, as if accepting a compliment. “Precisely.”

  They unroll maps on a low table: Pezijil drawn in neat ink lines, streets and canals like veins. Sima’s finger glides over neighborhoods as if petting them.

  “Here,” he says. “We cut water access. Here, we allow a corridor. We control the corridor. We charge the corridor with fire if needed.”

  Old Ji nods, already imagining it. “Corridors of fire,” he says, almost satisfied. “Keep our supply lines clean. Keep theirs desperate.”

  A clerk kneels beside them with a brush and trembling hands. He writes the orders as they speak. His ink blots once—just once—and his breath catches like he expects a whipping.

  Sima leans over, calm. He takes the brush from the clerk’s fingers and corrects the stroke with exquisite precision.

  “Your handwriting,” Sima says gently, “is too emotional. You make the characters weep.” He hands the brush back. “We cannot afford sentiment in the margins.”

  The clerk bows so low his forehead touches the floor. His shoulders shake anyway.

  ...

  Liwei adapts because he has to. He learns the city’s hidden veins: alleys that don’t show on maps, rooftop paths where laundry lines become handholds, courtyards behind temples where monks pretend not to notice sacks being slid under prayer benches.

  He uses temples as neutral ground for predictable traffic. The faithful still come. Even in war, people cling to routines like they’re ropes over a cliff.

  A monk squints at Liwei as a bag of grain is carried past the altar.

  “You will donate, yes?” the monk asks, voice mild.

  Liwei deadpans, “The donation is that you get to stay alive and complain about it tomorrow.”

  The monk considers, then says, “Fair,” and turns away as if this is an ordinary conversation between men of faith.

  Runners move at dusk, slipping through incense smoke and shadow. Water captains hide barrels under flower carts.

  Far from the barricades where men shout until their throats tear, Jin Na sits in a room that smells of lamp oil and wet stone.

  It used to be a magistrate’s archive. Now it is a war closet.

  A single lamp burns on a low table. Its flame is small, disciplined. It throws light across a map spread flat like a peeled skin—Pezijil’s grid of streets, its canals, its choke points, its temples and warehouses, its scars. Jin Na’s one good eye tracks along lines the way a butcher tracks sinew.

  He speaks without raising his voice.

  “Burn points,” he says.

  He taps three squares near the river. “Here.” He taps two alleys drawn narrow as veins. “Messenger routes. Not the obvious. The ones under the incense-courtyards.” He taps the wind markings scribbled in charcoal along the margins.

  He glances up at his team—six silhouettes arranged in the lamp’s edge-light.

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  “Panic,” he adds. “Not slaughter. Panic is cheaper. Panic reproduces itself.”

  Someone shifts, eager. Jin Na’s knife stills.

  “And resupply,” he finishes, soft. “We burn the idea that the city can feed itself without the palace. We make their stomach remember who owns the granary key.”

  He doesn’t say victory. He doesn’t say glory. He doesn’t even say for the Emperor.

  He says, “Do it clean.”

  Hui “Lady Ash-Thread” sits cross-legged beside a coil of fuse cord and checks it inch by inch. Her fingers move with precise calm. She doesn’t look up when Qin squats across from her and leans too close, grinning.

  Qin “Laughing Coal” holds up a small clay pot of black powder and sniffs it like wine.

  “Mmm,” he says. “Smells like promotion.”

  Hui doesn’t pause. “Smells like you’ll blow your fingers off if you keep tasting imperial secrets.”

  “I’m not tasting,” Qin says, offended. “I’m appreciating. The way a patriot appreciates—”

  Ruo cuts in without lifting his eyes. “You’re not a patriot.”

  Ran, beside him, adds in the same flat tone, “You’re an arsonist with attention problems.”

  Qin spreads his hands. “Fine. I’m a professional arsonist with attention problems. Even better. There’s consistency.”

  Gao Fire-Spark stands at the back. He tries to look serious and fails because his grin keeps escaping.

  “This one’s going to be pretty,” Gao says, eyes shining. “The roof will go whoomph and then—”

  Hui flicks the fuse cord at him like a whip.

  “Stop smiling like you’re at a festival,” she says. “You make me nervous.”

  “Why?” Gao asks. “Nervous you’ll enjoy it too much?”

  Monk Black-Salt, bald head reflecting the lamp’s glow, threads prayer beads around his wrist and speaks a sutra under his breath while sharpening something that is not in any legal inventory: a narrow blade with a hooked tip, designed for silence. His voice is calm enough to belong in a temple. His hands belong in a nightmare.

  “Even monks burn,” Qin says, glancing at him. “Is that in your scripture?”

  Black-Salt doesn’t look up. “All things burn,” he replies, serene.

  Ruo and Ran are shoulder to shoulder over a slate board, chalking ratios.

  Ran murmurs, “If the grain is dry, one pot does it. If it’s damp, we need oil.”

  Ruo snorts. “It’s Pezijil. Everything is damp, including their courage.”

  Qin leans in, grinning wider. “Ideals are flammable too.”

  Hui finally looks up, her expression mild in the way of a blade laid on silk. “So are lungs,” she says. “Try not to set yours on fire.”

  Gao reaches for one of the satchels and gets slapped on the back of the head—hard enough to make his teeth click.

  He turns, ready to protest, and finds Jin Na standing behind him, hand still raised.

  “Affection,” Jin Na says, deadpan. “Don’t mistake it for permission.”

  Gao rubs his skull and beams anyway. “Yes, Commander.”

  Qin whistles. “He’s like a puppy that learned to carry torches.”

  ...

  They move after midnight, when Pezijil’s noise collapses into the low, constant hum of suffering. The city’s lanterns burn fewer; oil has become precious. Shadows stretch longer, thicker.

  They dress like laborers. Their satchels look like tools. Their posture looks like fatigue.

  That is the trick: the city sees fatigue everywhere so it stops noticing it.

  They slip along the canal where reeds hiss and rats argue in the dark. They cross a courtyard where a shrine bell hangs cracked and silent. They pass under a temple eave where paper charms flutter like frightened insects.

  The target is a captured granary district—three warehouses now under rebel control, guarded by men whose eyes are raw from smoke and vigilance. The rebels have stacked grain like treasure. They’ve posted slogans on the doors. They’ve painted THE PEOPLE EAT FIRST in big, hopeful strokes.

  Hui pauses under a shadowed archway and listens to the wind the way sailors listen to waves. Her head tilts, eyes half-lidded.

  “East,” she murmurs. “Light it from the west side. We want the smoke to run toward the river, not back into the housing.”

  Qin snorts softly. “Listen to you. Saving civilians. Next you’ll start a charity.”

  Hui doesn’t glance at him. “I’m saving time,” she says. “Dead civilians don’t panic. They just stink.”

  Ruo and Ran slide forward like knives, silent. They’ve already counted the patrol pattern: two guards loop, one stops to piss behind a barrel every third round. Predictable.

  Black-Salt murmurs, “May your next life be less stupid,” and flicks a pebble into the puddle near the pissing guard’s feet.

  The guard startles, turns—just enough.

  Ran appears behind him and closes a hand over his mouth. Ruo’s blade slips in under the ribs, quick, angled. The guard’s body sags like a coat taken off a hook. No scream. Just a wet breath, stolen. They drag him into the shadow.

  Inside the first warehouse, the air is thick with grain dust—sweet, dry, and dangerously eager to ignite. Sacks are stacked to the rafters. A few mice freeze in their tracks, whiskers twitching, sensing something older than hunger.

  They plant charges like they’re setting tableware. Clay pots packed with powder. Wicks measured. Oil-soaked cloth tucked where flame will climb fastest. Not enough to explode the whole district and make a crater that heroes can cry over. Enough to collapse beams, ruin stock, choke the air with ash and question.

  Minimal killing. Minimal noise.

  Until someone interrupts.

  A door creaks.

  A young rebel steps in, carrying a lantern. He’s not a soldier. He’s a runner with cheeks hollow from skipping meals. His eyes widen when he sees shapes in the dark.

  His mouth opens.

  Hui moves first. She is there in a blink, palm slamming the lantern down. The flame gutters but doesn’t die; it licks at spilled oil like an eager tongue.

  Qin curses under his breath, “Oh, for—”

  The runner gasps, trying to back away.

  Black-Salt’s hooked blade flashes once, catching the runner behind the knee, dropping him hard. The boy’s hands slap the floor. The sound is loud in the grain-dust hush.

  Ruo is on him, pressing a hand to his mouth. The runner’s eyes flood with terror. He bites. Ruo hisses—not in pain, in annoyance.

  Hui’s face stays calm. She leans close to the runner, voice almost gentle.

  “Don’t scream,” she says. “If you scream, you die slower.”

  His eyes shake. He tries to obey. His chest jerks with panicked breaths anyway.

  Qin crouches and sniffs the fuse cord. “This one smells too nice,” he complains suddenly, because that is what his mouth does when his hands are doing murder. “Like pine.”

  Hui doesn’t look away from the runner. “Shut up,” she says, and her tone is so flat it could be mercy, “and breathe less.”

  She nods once.

  Ran’s knife slides in, quick as a thought. The runner’s body stiffens, then goes slack. Grain dust settles on his lashes like snow.

  Outside, a guard calls, “Everything alright?”

  Qin answers in a bored tone, mimicking the runner’s voice, “Spilled oil. Cleaning it.”

  There’s a pause.

  Then the guard grunts and walks away.

  They finish the placements faster now.

  Hui lights the first wick. The flame takes, bright and small, crawling along cord like a patient insect.

  They leave the warehouse. They move through the alley. Behind them, the first whumph is not dramatic. It is a deep, ugly cough—the sound of a building realizing it is dying. A roof beam groans. Dust billows. The sacks inside begin to hiss as heat climbs, rice turning to blackened kernels, wealth turning to ash.

  The second warehouse goes moments later. Then ,the third.

  By the time the district notices, the night is already full of smoke and screaming and men running with buckets that might as well be prayers.

  The Cinder Court is gone.

  ...

  Liwei arrives at dawn.

  He rides in on a horse that is too thin and too stubborn, surrounded by captains whose eyes are red from a night spent coughing instead of sleeping. The air near the granary district tastes like burnt sugar and despair.

  The warehouses are blackened shells. One roof has collapsed entirely, timbers splayed like broken ribs. Sacks lie split open, their contents spilled into mud and ash—rice turned gray, clumped, ruined. People stand around it in silence, staring at the waste as if it is a betrayal committed by the universe.

  A woman kneels and scoops a handful of charred grain anyway. She rubs it between her palms, trying to separate edible from dead. It stains her skin like mourning.

  Liwei dismounts. He steps through the ash carefully.

  A captain starts to speak, voice shaking. “We had guards. We had—”

  “I know,” Liwei says.

  His gaze moves over the scene like a measuring stick. Not anger. Calculation. His jaw tightens.

  Survivors begin to talk all at once: They came like ghosts. There was no fight. They didn’t even steal—why didn’t they steal? We didn’t hear—

  Liwei raises a hand and the noise thins.

  He looks at the collapsed roof, at the burn pattern along one wall where the fire climbed deliberately, not randomly. He crouches and picks up a length of fuse remnant—blackened, stiff, smelling of oil and something sharp beneath it.

  He doesn’t blame his people for panicking. He doesn’t even blame them for being fooled. He blames the court for being smarter than expected.

  The empire doesn’t need to win battles to win. It can lose battles and still strangle you with logistics.

  Liwei stands, ash clinging to his boots, and for a moment his face looks older than it should.

  Night watches change. Rotating passwords become a ritual: a phrase whispered, a response that shifts every day.

  “What’s in the pot?” a sentry asks.

  “Regret,” the next answers.

  Liwei orders false depots built—empty warehouses filled with soaked grain that won’t burn right, baited with hidden watchers in the rafters and sand barrels ready to smother flame. He assigns men not to fight intruders, but to watch for patterns: footsteps where there shouldn’t be, lanterns that flicker wrong, the smell of oil where only sweat should be.

  He starts hunting habits, not faces.

  He moves supplies in smaller loads, more frequently, along routes that change like weather. He uses monks and beggars and children as eyes—not as soldiers, but as observers, because nothing moves through a city without being seen by someone who has learned to survive by noticing.

  He tells his captains, “If you catch them, don’t chase like heroes. Heroes run into traps. You catch them like fishermen. Quietly. With patience. With nets.”

  A captain grimaces. “We’re fighting arsonists with nets.”

  Later, alone for a heartbeat, Liwei stands at the edge of the ruined granary district. He turns the scorched fuse remnant in his fingers, feeling how brittle it is, how small. How much hunger it can cause anyway.

  He closes his hand around it until it bites his palm.

  ...

  The first rumor arrives before the first scout.

  It seeps into Pezijil. A boatman at the river swears he saw banners like a flock of red birds moving along the far bank. A charcoal seller claims an entire village west of the canals has gone silent.

  By midday, the scouts confirm it with the dull, exhausted authority of men who have ridden too far for too long and don’t have the energy for theatre.

  They come back with dust in their eyelashes and fear dried into the lines around their mouths.

  “Hluay,” one says, and spits into the dirt like the word tastes foul. “Vanguard. Not raiders. Not bandits pretending to be an army. Proper columns. Drums. Engineers.”

  Behind the scout, a younger rider tries to laugh it off. The laugh breaks halfway. It falls to the ground like a stone that doesn’t bounce.

  Refugees follow. Families, widows, boys with shoulders already hunched into adulthood, old men with their only wealth tied in cloth bundles. They enter through alleys, over broken walls, in the gaps between barricades, because the city has been cut into compartments by rebellion and counter-rebellion and hunger, and people learn fast where the cracks are.

  They bring stories like infections.

  “Villages emptied,” a woman says, voice flat. Her hands shake as she clutches a pot with a lid tied on by rope.

  “They move like weather,” a boy adds, too young to have that sort of certainty and already cursed with it. “You hear them before you see them. You hear the carts. The chanting...”

  The barricades, once the outer edge of Liwei’s control, suddenly feel like children’s toys. A pile of carts and stones, brave and stupid. Pezijil, which has spent weeks pretending it is the whole world—its markets, its palaces, its riots, its own endless appetite—feels abruptly small.

  Like a candle realizing there’s a storm.

  Zhou Liwei stands on a roofline and looks west, past the smoke that rises from last night’s burns. The horizon isn’t clear—cities never have clear horizons—but there is a subtle smear there, a line of movement beneath the sky’s pale skin. He can’t see banners yet. He can see the idea of them: the way birds avoid that direction, the way the air seems to hold its breath.

  ...

  Tents line up in the Hluay camp. Cooking fires burn low, controlled, fed in measured handfuls. Horses are watered in rotations. Men drill without shouting.

  Li Song sits at a campaign table under a canopy of woven reed and leather. A lamp burns. A clerk reads reports until his throat goes hoarse. Li Song doesn’t drink while listening. He doesn’t eat. He doesn’t fidget. He has the calm of a man who knows that time is the most obedient soldier.

  He takes a report, skims, then sets it down as if it is a piece of trash.

  “Pezijil,” he says, almost bored.

  An officer straightens. “Yes, General.”

  Li Song taps the parchment once. “Already cracked pottery,” he murmurs. “We don’t have to smash it. We have to pick it up before someone else does.”

  He looks at the map. The city’s lines are tight. Too many mouths in too little space. The palace squats at the center like an organ that thinks it’s immortal.

  “The empire is bleeding itself to defend the Imperial City,” Li Song continues. “The rebels are learning logistics. And the Emperor… is doing what emperors do best.”

  “What’s that?” someone asks.

  Li Song’s mouth lifts slightly. “Nothing.”

  Across from him, Linh paces like an animal that has been put in a cage too small.

  Linh looks like a prophet who got too close to his own god and kept walking anyway.

  A heavy coat swallows him—dark wool and scorched leather, the hood pulled low so the lantern-light can’t get an easy read on his face. What skin shows is a map of old fire: half his jaw and throat puckered into pale, ropey scars, the burn climbing under the collar as if it still wants to claim him. One side of his body moves with a careful economy, the kind that says something is missing without announcing it; the empty sleeve is folded and pinned inside the coat, hidden like a shame or a relic. His missing eye sits behind shadow and cloth.

  He leans on his cane that is too ornate to be practical and too practical to be an ornament—its handle carved into an eagle skull, beak hooked, eye sockets hollow. When he shifts his weight, the skull seems to nod, approving or judging, depending on the angle of the firelight.

  His remaining eye is bright with a fever that isn’t sickness. It’s conviction. It’s the kind of heat that ruins men and then convinces them they’ve been purified.

  Linh’s hand clenches on the handle. He wants spectacle. He wants a sunrise that burns the world clean, a victory so dramatic it becomes scripture.

  “Don’t rush the walls,” Li Song says, tapping the map where Pezijil’s outer districts sprawl. He gestures to the river. “Control waterways. Chain the barges. Set patrols. If they move grain by water, we make water a noose.”

  An officer points out, hesitant, “The south route is already disrupted by the rebellion. Supplies are thin.”

  Li Song nods. “Good. We thin it further.”

  He marks roads with ink. “Interdict southbound supplies. Don’t chase rebels. Chase wagons. If they have to fight for every sack of rice, they will start fighting each other.”

  Linh leans in, impatient. “And when do we hit them?”

  Li Song doesn’t answer immediately. He reaches under the table and pulls out a small model—a crude wooden frame with ropes, a sling, and a counterweight stone.

  He sets it down.

  “Traction engines,” he says. “Not the old light throwers. Heavier frames, more men per pull. They can lob incandescent stone over walls without needing to be close enough to taste arrows.”

  He nods to another bundle. A shielded structure, like a crawling beetle made of wood and hide.

  “Shielded sappers,” Li Song continues. “Like tortoises.”

  Another officer unrolls a diagram: a modified stone-thrower with clay pots marked in red.

  “Incendiary payloads,” Li Song says. “Pitch. Oil.”

  Linh’s eye shines despite himself. “Burn them,” he whispers.

  ...

  Inside Pezijil’s Imperial City, only incense burns, for now.

  Sima and Old Ji receive the same report: Hluay banners on the horizon, vanguard moving in disciplined columns.

  “This can be turned,” Old Ji says softly.

  Sima’s mouth tightens. “Turned into what?”

  “Into a grind,” Old Ji replies. “Let the rebels and the Hluay bleed each other. Let Zhou Liwei spend his stores fighting a new enemy. Let the Hluay spend their momentum chewing through chaos. Then we—”

  Sima interrupts, blunt. “Then we kill whoever is still standing.”

  Sima looks past him as if he is furniture. “The rebels are inside our walls,” he says. “The Hluay are outside. I want one problem, not two.”

  Ji’s gaze slides toward the window where smoke rises from the city. “If you smash the rebels now,” he says, “you smash them into martyrs. Martyrs feed revolutions better than bread.”

  Sima’s lips curl. “Martyrs burn.”

  “And smoke carries,” Ji murmurs. “Sometimes it carries far enough to bring new enemies.”

  Sima nods. “Then unleash Jin Na harder,” he says. “No more delicate cuts. We cut the rebels’ throat and be done.”

  Outside, in the city’s bruised streets, Zhou Liwei’s people hear the same news and taste it differently.

  Some cheer—because any enemy of the Emperor feels like a friend.

  Liwei does not cheer.

  He gathers his captains in a courtyard that used to belong to a minor noble. He draws routes in dust. He points at rooftops, at temple courtyards, at canal bridges.

  “We are not alone in the city anymore,” he says. “We are not even the main story.”

  A hothead spits. “So we fight them too.”

  Liwei’s eyes are tired. “We fight whoever tries to eat us,” he says. “That is the only policy that matters.”

  He looks out over the barricades his people built, the infrastructure they turned out of rage. He thinks of Old Ji’s unseen hands lighting sacks of grain like candles.

  He thinks of Hluay siege engines rolling closer like slow thunder.

  He doesn’t say we’re doomed. He doesn’t say we’ll win.

  He says, “Get ready.”

  And his personal army—armoured men and women with spears, muskets, and bandages already wrapped around their wrists like pre-emptive mourning—tighten their grips and nod.

  They are ready to fight.