Mei Huang lays out her client on the sheets. He has been one of her easier ones. Quick to slumber and eager to please, but not eager enough that he would breach etiquette. A smile slits her face at the memory of his clumsy overtures, almost shy, the performance of a boy, for all his musculature would suggest a man. That was never a possibility. Mei Huang prefers to keep pleasure and providence separate; and besides, her heart lies elsewhere, preserved in resin for the devoted to see.

She disinfects her scalpel in a saucer of boiling water. When the blade is hot enough, she applies the tip to his sternum and cuts, slicing along the breastbone, down to his groin. Skin and muscle part into wings, otherwise undamaged. Mei Huang prides herself on her ability to leave minimal scarring.

Under the marble rungs of his ribs, viscera gleam and pulse.

For a moment, she can see how this vision might invite desire. To see someone, man or woman, revealed as such, to witness them so vulnerable, it is a kind of power, compelling in its rarity. But that is not what she is here for.

Gingerly, Mei Huang leans forward to inspect the glyphs inlaid into the man’s bones: government-issue agate, embedded without artistry; the stones dulled by mucus, no enchantment to preserve their shine. A soldier’s markings and a soldier’s future, a tragedy dug into the trenches. Dead before his twenty-third birthday, his eyes consigned to the crows.

It is strange, Mei Huang thinks as she intones a letter from the Lipless Prophet’s alphabet, how prophecy circumvents borders. No matter the continent or the practitioner, whether they dwell in nubivagant jellyfish or on the spines of the world-turtles, it is all the same, every icon and interpretation, every beginning and every end. The language of destiny is as consistent as mankind’s appetite for murder.

The air disgorges filaments of green and gold, a frothing of light. Like lace, she winds them around her fingertips, their brilliance massing in the cup of her palm. Another syllable is whispered, and reality bends along the axis of her desire.

She exhales. The effulgence unwraps, worms down her arm to seep into the porous calcium of his skeleton. He twitches. Mei Huang tugs the skeins, feels his future clatter into a fresh arrangement. Not a precise art, hers. Nothing that can turn have not into have, but powerful enough, nonetheless, to slide a future along the gradient of near possibilities.

Another death: this time on the battlements, skewered by lances.

“Again,” Mei Huang tells the universe.

And once more, he dies, suffocated by shit and mud.

“Again.”

The lantern-light convulses. Mei Huang repeats the rite so many times it becomes indistinguishable from breath, and still every iteration ends with the soldier dead. The hours gorge themselves on her as she works. Soon enough, she is hollowed through, every scrap of endurance devoured.

“Again.”

The air holds still.