It startled her to hear him say I. It was like reaching for someone’s cheek in the dark, but finding instead the intimate wetness of their open mouth.

He had the image of his relationship to Esen being a thin strip of metal that Ouyang was deliberately bending back and forth. Each time it bent, it hurt. Maybe it wouldn’t hurt after it finally snapped, but Ouyang couldn’t make himself believe it.

There was a strange, ill satisfaction there, as if Esen had proved something Lord Wang wanted—but in having proved it, had killed some other part that was still holding out hope.

The unfamiliar Han’er name for Khanbaliq gave Ouyang a discombobulated feeling, as if he and Zhang were denizens of different worlds who had chanced upon each other in the uncanny space between.

For the first time since her adolescence she looked down at her body and didn’t feel aversion, but simply the fact of herself.

The sight seemed oddly familiar. It made her think of undressing in her storeroom in the monastery, and how the changed and threatening body she had uncovered had always seemed to belong to someone else. But this invisible agony-hand was undeniably hers, and so was the stump.

How could her body be a woman’s body, if it didn’t house a woman? Zhu wasn’t the grown-up version of that girl with the nothing fate.

There was a touching pureness to it that Ouyang envied. He had never been able to inhabit a moment of pleasure as simply and purely as Esen did. Just knowing that it was transient—that any moment would be drained of its sweetness and vividness once it became memory—made it bittersweet to him even as it was happening.

She knew that when it came down to it, you survived and died alone. But perhaps there was still a comfort in having someone at your side while it happened.