I picked a single thread. Revenge in the shape of diplomacy makes it smell like a plan; revenge in the shape of a blade smells like oil and bright metal. I chose the first because even I had not the stomach to tear an entire city in half for a man, however beloved.
My brother had left behind a student, a woman named Mei with hair like winter glue and a temper to match. She had the notebooks and a small, fiercely folded map. She agreed to help, not because I promised payment (I had none) but because she owed the man who had taught her a world.
Our first mark was a merchant named Qiao, a suave man with a tie of gold thread and a habit of laughing at other people's tragedies. He controlled a line of ships and their crew, bought silence in the same size as his chests of tea, and used his warehouses as places where inconvenient things — like people — could be made small. The ledger that Yù's bone-map had lit up pointed to a cargo manifest with Qiao's name scrawled across it.
We watched his warehouses with the patience learned by those who have already lost. Mei taught me to read a ledger like a lover's face: the pauses, the spaces, the things that were not said. We learned the rhythm of the watchmen, the smell of wet ropes at dawn, and where the rats favored the join in the boards.
On the night we moved, Yù lifted us across the harbor on a wind that smelled of iron and cold tea. She did not come close, only low enough for us to slip through the lattices like a wind through reed. We cut the lock of Qiao's ledger room and read by starlight, fingers trembling not from cold but from the knowledge that this was the first step of a path with no return.
The manifest was a list of names. A column of destinations kept repeating in tiny print: Jade Quarter, Long Bridge, Merchant's Row. Two entries were different. One had a strange notation: "No return" with a stamp of a symbol none of us recognized. The other had the simple word I had learned to hate: "buried."
We did not find the man himself that night, but we found proof. A ledger with his handwriting tucked into a parcel marked for "study materials" — a notebook with his notes on a local chronicle and, beneath the margin, the careful scrawl of a schematic for a device my brother had been working on: a small thing meant to translate the pitch of wind into a coded language. It was genius and useless and perfect at once.
When we left the warehouse, the watchman found us, or perhaps we let ourselves be found — revenge requires theater sometimes. In the scuffle that followed, a blade nicked my cheek. Blood tasted like regret. The watchman's breath fogged the air and he screamed for help.
We ran into an alley and found Yù waiting. She lifted us up on a sigh and carried us to an island in the middle of the harbor — a place with stones shaped like sleeping children and an old woman who sold incense that smelled of sea-salt and forgiveness. The woman took our hands, looked at the ledger, and said a quiet prayer. The prayer did not stop the world from turning, but it made the world feel, for a moment, like something that still could be asked of.
"You are young to carry anger," she said. "It will teach you things. It will teach you that the world is not only stones and thieves but also choices."
Choices. The word sat between us like a coin, and I spent it like a man who had just learned the price of everything.