“Again,” Mei Huang repeats, louder, the taste of tin welling in her mouth.

Nothing comes.

She daubs her lips with her tongue, finds blood there too. When was the last time she drank water or sipped from her broth, meticulously prepared the evening before, bone and rich offal boiled to pale liquid? Mei Huang curses her negligence as she paces the cramped guest room, a knuckle wedged between her teeth. Maybe that was why she failed. Maybe, if she had been careful, if she had paced herself, if she hadn’t been so incompetent, the outcome would have differed.

Flagellation refines to fury, and Mei Huang digs nails into her palms, throat constricting. Trembling, she smooths a hand over her skull and then scratches against her chest, just below the collarbone. Her hair is matted and slick with sweat. Stupid, stupid, stupid. What would Mei Ying have said?

A groan alerts her to a new dilemma: the man is stirring.

Mei Huang stumbles to the bed. His chest heaves once, twice, before sleep cauls him anew, cossets him in restive silence. Perhaps the situation isn’t completely irredeemable, Mei Huang decides, plucking thread and needle from her kit.

Quickly, breath starved to flutters, she sews the soldier back together. Her stitches are uneven: one longer than another, one skewed to the right, irrefutably ugly. But Mei Huang cannot indulge in perfection. Up she goes, pursued by necessity, faster and faster, needle glimmering topaz and lucent brown.

She is almost to the top, almost past the summit of his ribs. Hope batters at her lungs, and then his eyes beat open, sclera glistening white as tendon.

A scream unknots in his throat.

“No. No, no, no.” Mei Huang straddles his chest, hoping to pin him down, palm over his mouth. There is so little left to do, so little distance between her and resolution. It cannot end like this. In her panic, she forgets the difference between their physiques, his size and her stature, the ponderosity of muscles engineered in war, and the debility that results from an existence consigned to She Who Hungers. In her panic, she almost forgets how long she’s been waiting for this.

He flings her away. Mei Huang thumps into the wall and slides into the crevice between mattress and masonry, the air jerked from her lungs. She scrabbles upright in time to see her client sit up, see his sutures undo; intestines disgorging over his thighs in oily loops. He gazes down, face bled of color, before his mouth rounds into animal despair.

As a baying loosens, the man’s organs slithering the way of his digestive tract, Mei Huang makes a choice, embraces the inevitability that awaits every ming-ren. She’d expected—wanted—more years, more time in the Courts of Hunger, more opportunity to whet her art, develop finesse. Better now than later, she supposes. A shortened destiny in exchange for a foreshortened grief.