Please Stop Spreading Rumors About Me — They Keep Coming True

The night before the final, I tried to send my family away. They wouldn’t go.

I’d thought about it all through the dark hours — Xue Ningzhi’s words sitting in me like swallowed stones. ’When I pull your seam, it frays outward. Everyone woven into your legend frays with it.’ Somewhere around the third watch, I’d decided: whatever happened to me tomorrow, I would not let it happen to them. So I gathered them — Yun Shu, Ji Lan, Bai Qing, Tao Tao — in the lamplight of my little quarters, and I told them the truth. All of it. Even the parts they didn’t know.

I told them about the Scroll. I let it speak, and the three of them heard, for the first time, the voice that had been steering my whole impossible rise — and watched the empty air beside my shoulder where they still couldn’t see it. I told them about the predecessor, the brightest name gone from the sky. I told them what Xue Ningzhi had threatened. And then I told them what I’d decided to do about it.

"Tomorrow she’s going to try to pull the seam," I said. "And if she does, it doesn’t just take me. It takes everyone she can prove is woven into my legend. You. All of you." I made myself meet each of their eyes. "So I need you to leave. Tonight. Distance yourselves from me, publicly, before the final — denounce me, even, say you were fooled, whatever it takes to cut the thread between us. Let me face it alone. I will not — I will not — let the four of you fray out of the sky because you stood too close to me. Please. Go."

Silence.

And then, one by one, my impossible family told me no.

Tao Tao first, fierce and immediate, her chin up: "I built you an army, Master. I’m not leaving the army’s general the night before the battle. That’s not how any of this works."

Then Bai Qing, quiet and certain, her hand resting on her sword: "You stood in a ring and made ten million people see me, when you could have just won. You think I’d save my own skin and let you stand alone now? I’d rather fray. At least it’d be honest."

Then Ji Lan, with that bell-and-knife laugh of hers, though her eyes were wet: "Denounce you? Darling, I’m the finest craftsman of my generation, and the single best thing I have ever attached my name to is you. I came here to destroy you and now I’m going to die defending you, and the symmetry alone is worth it. No."

And then Yun Shu — Yun Shu, who’d bent the one unbendable thing in her whole life for me — slid her black ledger across the table. The same way she had the night she chose not to file it. She said, very steadily: "I already made this choice, Lin Bo. Weeks ago. When I didn’t report you. I knew what it could cost. I chose you anyway, with my eyes open, because the kindest true thing and the realest true thing were finally the same, and they were you." Her voice didn’t waver. "I don’t unmake my decisions because they got dangerous. That’s not what the truth is for. I’m staying."

I looked at the four of them — the disciple, the blade, the artist, the debunker — and I couldn’t speak for a long moment. Twenty-six years I’d spent certain I would die alone and unnoticed. And now I couldn’t get rid of the people who loved me even to save their lives.

"You’re all impossible," I finally managed. "You know that? You’re supposed to run. Everyone runs."

"We’re not everyone," said Yun Shu quietly. "We’re yours. Get used to it."

The Scroll, on my shoulder, made a small, wet, broken sound. "Talent," it whispered. "The one before. They had people too. At the end. But the people — the people ran. When the erasing started, when it got dangerous, they scattered, because that’s what people do, and the brightest name in the sky died alone, with no one left to remember—" It stopped, overcome. "Yours didn’t run. Do you understand what that means? Yours didn’t run."

Something turned over in me then. A piece of the impossible idea I’d been building, clicking into place, lit up suddenly by the Scroll’s grief.

The predecessor was believed in. But maybe never loved like this. Never known like this. Never refused-to-be-left like this.

And that difference — that small, stubborn difference — might be everything.

"Get some sleep," I told my family, my voice chocked. "All of you. Tomorrow’s going to be the strangest day of our lives." I almost smiled. "I have a plan. I’m not going to tell you what it is, because it’s mad, and you’d try to talk me out of it, and you’d be right, and I’m going to do it anyway." I put my hand near the Scroll, as close as I could come to holding it. "But it only works because none of you ran. So thank you. For being impossible. For being mine."

We didn’t really sleep. We sat up together — the five of us and the ghost — in the lamplight, and Tao Tao read the Deeds aloud one more time and we all laughed at the candle part, and Ji Lan told stories about the early days of her fame, and Bai Qing sharpened her sword, and Yun Shu sat close enough that her shoulder touched mine and didn’t move it, and I held Granny Fen’s noodle pot and looked at the gap at the top of the sky and was not, for the first time in my whole life, afraid of being forgotten.

Because whatever happened tomorrow, I had been known. Truly. By these four impossible people.

And I was starting to understand that being known like that might be the one thing in all the world that even erasure couldn’t touch.

Dawn came grey and gold over the capital.

I stood. Put on the stupid thunder-trousers. Picked up the noodle pot. And walked out with my family at my back to face the largest stage in the world, the Empire’s perfect weapon, the woman who thought forgetting was mercy, and the hidden god who would decide whether I deserved to exist.

"Let’s go be impossible," I said.

And we went.