Chapter 137: Yeah, Sure
"I overclocked him," Xuan said.
The word dropped into the room and died there. Lian’s brow creased. On the floor, Wei rotated his head a few painful degrees to aim the same baffled look up at his Young Master, the two of them united for one fragile moment in the dawning suspicion that the man who ran their lives had finally lost the thread.
[ Flawless, Xuan. (◡‿◡) ] Mira, savoring every second of it. [ You walk in on a crime scene and lead with a word that exists in one language, spoken by one dead man, on a planet nobody here can find. The instincts of a master spy. ]
’It bought me three seconds. And that is a head start.’
"What does that mean?" Lian had one foot inside the door now, the covered dish still in both hands, ash on her sleeves and worry tugging the corner of her mouth. "Overclocked."
"Something I picked up in Yuncheng." The lie built itself smooth and fast, the way they always did when Yuncheng was carrying the weight; the city had quietly become his all-purpose answer for every word and trick he had no business owning. "It means you take something and make it better. Stronger. Push it past where it was built to run." He tipped his chin at Wei. "I overclocked him. He’s an upgrade now."
Lian looked at Wei. Wei — soaked, steaming faintly, glowing at the edges like a coal that hadn’t decided whether to die — lifted one hand and gave her a weak, dazed little wave.
"You improved him," she said.
"That’s right."
"Yeah, sure."
She held his eyes a beat, and Xuan watched the question form behind them, and watched her fold it up and put it away unasked, the way she’d been doing for months. She didn’t grasp half of what fell out of his mouth, and she’d stopped needing to. She trusted him the way she trusted the floor under her feet — without checking it first, because it had never once dropped her. She filed overclocking onto the long and lengthening list of things her Young Master could apparently do, and crossed the room.
[ Every time I see her I like her more and more. ] Mira, fond. [ She’s the only one of you born with sense, and she spends it all on ignoring the evidence. ]
’Don’t get to attached. You’re a secret, at least for now. Secrets don’t get to have favorites.’
[ This secret has opinions. ]
Lian swept a drift of ash off the low table with her forearm and set the dish down with the small decisive thump of a woman repossessing a room from chaos. She crouched, hooked a hand under Wei’s arm, and hauled — and Wei, who outweighed her by a good margin, came up easily, because she had spent two years learning precisely how to lift a body that didn’t want to be lifted.
"Sit. Lean on the wall. Breathe," she ordered, parking him upright. "Whatever he did to you, you look like you lost a wrestling match to a furnace."
"I—" Wei swallowed, and his voice came out cracked and reverent and a little unhinged. "I think I won, actually."
Lian uncovered the dish — dumplings, still soft with steam, lined up in the careful rows of someone who had plated them before the day caught fire — and slid it in front of Xuan with a look that left no room to argue. "You haven’t eaten since this morning. I can always tell. You get a specific stupid face when you’re running on nothing."
"I do not have a—"
"You’re making it right now."
He ate a dumpling. It was, infuriatingly, exactly what he’d wanted.
Around a second one he nodded at her ash-grey sleeves. "How was the old man? You’re wearing half his workshop."
Something kindled in her at the question, quick and bright, before she pushed it back down toward modesty. "He let me run the third refinement on my own today. The frost-lotus base." She tucked a loose strand behind her ear, leaving a smear of soot on her cheek she had no idea was there. "It held all the way to sediment. He didn’t say a word, but he didn’t take the ladle back either, and from Master Fu that’s a standing ovation."
"That’s enormous." He let her hear that he meant it. "Fu doesn’t hand the ladle to people he’s keeping around out of pity."
"It nearly seized at the second fold." Her mouth tugged sideways at the memory. "I was sure I’d torched a week of his reagents. My hands were shaking so badly I could barely—" She stopped, took in the scorched floorboards, the smoke still unspooling out the window, the luminous disciple propped against the wall, and the corner of her mouth gave out entirely. "...And here I am telling you about my shaky hands."
"No, go on." Xuan waved a dumpling grandly at the wreckage. "Your day sounds vastly more responsible than mine."
From the wall, Wei summoned the courage to clear his throat. "For the record," he rasped, "I did try to leave."
"He tried to leave," Xuan told Lian, gleeful. "I offered him the single most valuable thing I own, and he bolted for the door. Informed me his talent was adequate. Said he’d made his peace with adequate."
Lian turned to Wei, caught somewhere between pity and amazement. "You ran from a gift?"
"I didn’t know it was a gift!" Wei’s dignity mounted a doomed final charge. "He told me to take my robe off and produced an unmarked vial out of his sleeve. You weren’t here. The situation was deeply alarming."
Xuan opened his mouth to defend the situation, discovered he could not, and ate another dumpling instead.
For a while it was easy in a way the last months had rarely allowed — three people in a half-burned room, dumplings going cold, Wei piecing himself back together against the wall, Lian perched on the table’s edge with her sooty sleeves and the quiet, pleased glow of a girl who’d held a refinement to sediment. For one hour, nothing in the room needed outmaneuvering.
[ Careful. ] Mira, gone soft for once. [ You’re happy. The last time you got this comfortable, a mountain came down on your head. ]
’Let me have the dumplings, Mira.’
Lian was halfway through liberating the dumpling Xuan had been saving when something crossed her face and she straightened, the prize forgotten between her fingers.
"Oh — Xuan." She set it back down, and the ease in the room cooled a notch as she did. "I forgot, you got me talking and it went right out of my head. A disciple came by before my lesson, with word from the road." She wiped her hands on her ruined sleeves. "Your father and Elder Ren will be back within a few hours. They’ve finished with the mines."
The dumpling Xuan was holding paused halfway to his mouth.
A few hours. He chewed slowly and let the shape of it arrive. His father didn’t ride home from a finished campaign to rest his boots by the fire — he rode home to gather the elders and decide what came next, now that two mines were theirs and the ground under everyone had shifted. Two won mines, a war warming on the far edge of the map, a Frostmoon heir already on the road to talk terms. Decisions stacked like cordwood, every one of them waiting on the same table.
He set the dumpling down.
"Looks like we’re getting a council," he said, half to the room and half to himself.
