The bodies were still burning when Chen Yu danced.
Ash floated in the wind like gray snow. Trees watched in silence. The village, once muted with fear, now simmered with whispers and smoke. The flames from Eli's pyre licked the air behind him, casting his shadow long and twitching like a mad puppet on the dirt road.
Chen Yu spun on his heel, arms out wide.
"Come one, come all! Step right up! Roast mutant brain stew! Now with extra guilt and aftertaste!"
He gave a theatrical bow, straightened, and wore the smile of a man trying not to scream.
Li Wei sat nearby on a broken fence, silent as usual, staring into the fire like it owed him answers. Rui crouched on a log, her eyes flicking between the two of them. The flames reflected in her gaze like tiny blood moons.
"You good?" she asked softly, watching Chen Yu kick at a burning chair like it had insulted him.
"I'm better than good, Rui-Rui!" Chen Yu grinned, exaggerated and toothy. "I just performed a mercy execution, doused a cult, and found a rat's skull with a third eye in their stew pot. I am in my happy place, thank you very much."
Rui didn't laugh.
He sighed, dropping onto the dirt beside her, still smirking but quieter now. "You ever kill a man who thinks he's doing God's work? The kind that smiles while you stab him, like you just proved him right?"
She nodded once. "Yes."
Chen Yu blinked. "…Okay. Didn't expect that."
There was a silence between them. Not awkward. Just… full.
Li Wei stood, finally, and walked over. "We move at dawn."
"Already? We just slaughtered a sermon," Chen Yu said, brushing soot off his pants. "Can't we at least nap on the corpse pile?"
Li Wei ignored him.
Rui's voice cut through the tension. "Where to?"
"There's a route north. Less settlements. Less mouths. Maybe… less eyes," Li Wei said. "I don't want to run into another Ember village."
Chen Yu raised an eyebrow. "We sure about that? Because I loved being called 'unclean filth' by a bunch of robed cannibals."
Li Wei didn't answer, but the way he looked at the embers suggested he hadn't forgotten a single insult. Not one.
As the night thickened, they packed up in silence. Rui wiped her blade clean. Chen Yu checked the battery on the stolen Ascendancy scanner with a shrug. "Still pinging. Mutant density low. Guess the fanatics killed all their neighbors."
"Or the neighbors were the mutants," Rui muttered.
Chen Yu laughed and suddenly barked, "Ha! Imagine if we were the mutants all along!"
No one laughed with him.
He whistled to himself, a tune he used to sing at night in his childhood home—long gone now, eaten by flame or time. "I miss real music," he mumbled, strapping his bag. "I miss the radio. I miss TV. I even miss bad TikToks."
"You miss people," Rui said plainly.
Chen Yu's smile faltered just a crack. "Maybe. But I prefer the quiet now. Less lies."
They slept in shifts, with Chen Yu awake last. He sat by the fire, humming to himself and tossing bones into the flames one by one like wishes. Occasionally, he whispered something—maybe to the wind, maybe to a ghost, maybe to himself.
"Don't worry, Eli," he muttered. "You were right. We are unclean. Just not in the way you thought."
And then, in a voice barely audible:
"But I'll make them worse. So much worse."