You were right—when we were young, I was always lying. Lying to trick my grandmother into telling me more about Reforging, lying to have Mother do the same. It was like his eyes stripped me down to my essence, to the only skill I had been born with, my most outstanding trait, and I lied and lied to save myself.

“What?” he said again, this time darkly. The men around the room began to shift.

“Yes. You slept with me and then left. My blood didn’t come that next month. And I was alone here, carrying your child, running a restaurant and your surveillance network. But I Reforged too much. It was in my blood. In the baby’s blood. The baby didn’t even make it a few months in my body before the pencils killed it. And when I lost the baby, I lost my Reforging too.”

“That’s . . .” He had gone pale. “That’s not possible. Your aunt never said . . .”

“Did you ever think that maybe she didn’t lose your child on purpose?” I was treading on thin ice. I recognized this weak point, knew this was where I needed to twist. “That maybe the same thing that happened to me happened to her?”

“Don’t—”

“You made us Reforge, over and over. You killed us.”

“Your aunt never lost the ability to Reforge.”

“You just didn’t know Meng and I were doing them all.”

His jaw tightened. “But you Reforged my pencil. A few weeks ago.”

“I did not. I guessed what you had to say. Do you want me to prove it? You, who made us go through this?” My voice became shrill. I pulled out a pencil, one whose heart I made with Torou and which I had encased carefully in the darkest wood I could get my hands on. “You, who promised me your heart, then left, whose child took away my one power? Took away my aunt’s? I’ll show you, let me show you—”

I stood tall in front of him, pulling up my sleeve, the phoenix pale. I stabbed it with the pencil.

It gouged my skin and I shrieked. He stepped back and the men stepped forward.

“Stop her,” Mr. Gao said weakly.

A man tried to grab me from behind. I threw him off and stabbed my wrist again. The tip of the pencil was red and gleaming, blood trickled down my phoenix, pure red without any ink in sight. I stabbed again and again, screaming, and crying, thinking of you and your mother and my mother and all of the wars and countries we fled, until two men were able to separate my arms and I was weeping, really, truly, weeping, from the pain, and from so much more.

“Clean her up,” Mr. Gao commanded from what sounded very far away. “She is useless to us.”