“No. And even if we could, we would not. Immortality is a poor gift, a gorgeous lie. Everyone thinks they want to live forever, but they don’t know what it means. And before you ask, it means boredom. Endless boredom. There is nothing beautiful about infinity. It is tiresome and you’d soon wish you were dead. What you have is so much better.” Mei Huang leans forward, pats his thigh in sympathy. “There are people who would kill to be able to choose their own deaths.”

“Is that even possible?’

She nods, prim, and folds her secrets under latticed fingers. Idiot foreigner. Of course it’s possible. He’d died already, had walked his road to the end she’d foreseen—a vision of disembowelment, entrails steaming over snow. Or white linen, Mei Huang appends dutifully, silent as the soldier counts her payment out in the smallest possible denominations; his thumb stroking orbits across each coin, as though the heat from his skin might linger, might incite a change of heart. “Yes. Many do it every day.”

“What do I do now?” he asks, at last, with a tremor in his voice. “What do I do with this gift?”

Mei Huang, heaving with predatory divinity, shrugs. “Live and hope you choose enough of the right decisions that you don’t die any time too soon.”

The streets of Hong are narrow by necessity, its stacks of shops and houses cut deep into the world-turtle’s shell. Gutters and gargoyles jut from the balconies while housewives flap laundry over the balustrades, exchanging gossip as they go. From somewhere, a woman calls for customers, promising lobes of curried offal, the ingredients so fresh they still shudder with the world-turtle’s life force.

Below, Mei Huang wanders the tableau without a seeming purpose, a hand over her belly. The goddess had grown tremendous in the last hour, so much so that it has become impossible to walk without waddling splay-footed over the cobblestones. She halts at a lamppost and sucks in a ragged breath, wincing at the strain on her spine. Mei Ying, she thinks. Mei Ying, I hope you’re watching.

A hand fits itself around the small of her back. “Ma’am, could I be—Mei Huang?”

She looks up. The face above hers totters on familiar: soft-boned and round, its lips full. Black hair wisps from a maiden-braid, worn ironically in this case. Lei Yang, necromancer, scrutinizes Mei Huang, expression cloying.

“Already? I thought it’d be another five years, at least,” Lei Yang says.

“It was that or a dead soldier in the inn’s bed.”

“Would that have been so terrible? There are so many of them. Thousands. Like ants crawling all over the world-turtle’s back. No one would have noticed his loss.” Bone-beetles shift in Lei Yang’s hair, chips of luminescent white against the dark.