Gu of a Second Life

At twelve years old, Chu Jingzhe stood in the corner of the shrine on Gu-Selection Night and watched the torches turn the ancestral boards the color of meat.

That was the night his clan chose him for the furnace pits. Fifteen years they farmed him after that — fifteen years of drawing gu for other men's trade, of counting the nights between quota days, of learning that on this mountain the weakest crop was a person. At twenty-seven they drew his own gu out of him finished, the Mirror-Heart, the pride of the brood jars, and he died on the shed stones with its warmth still in his mouth.

He woke at twelve again, on the same night, in the same corner, with the same torches burning.

And under his ribs, something beat.

The Mirror-Heart Gu came back with him — the mother's brood, the thing that ate emotion the way other gu eat blood, that previews an enemy's next move one heartbeat before the muscle commits, that grows stronger on every drop of hate its keeper spends. It is the finest weapon on the mountain. It is also the end of him: every deep drawing feeds the hate, and the day the hate crests the brim, the gu breaks his body and he stops being a man. The clan spent a lifetime building that trap. This time, he knows the shape of it.

This time he does not run.

The mountain runs on ledgers. The pits hold three hundred heads, counted every selection like stock, rendered at nine furnaces, and the chief Chu Tiankuo — a smiling man, a careful man, a man who writes stock and crop in his own brush hand — sells his own clansmen down the mountain by twelves, at three pills a head, to a pill-maker in the Central Plains who pays in flame-marrow. Above the pits sit eight gu-mothers, the clan's breeding wonders: the Whisper, the Gold-Silkworm, the Blood-Nest, the Corpse-Flower, the Winter-Hollow, the Face-Borrower, the Bone-Chime, and under the shrine boards the Hundred-Eye that sees what the chief allows. A slave who tamed one mother would be a treasure. A slave who tamed seven would be a miracle.

Chu Jingzhe means to be both, and then to be something the mountain has no word for.

He has one ally. A Man was marked for the pits at thirteen, a wild girl who asks no questions about his past because she does not care what he was — only what he does. She drinks half of everything he drinks, checks his pulse at the wrist every dawn to see if the heart-gu ate him yet, and touches him without wanting a gu out of it. On a mountain where every hand takes, she is the only hand that gives. His flaw is that he knows the price of everyone; his road is learning that one person kept herself off the ledger, free, all these years.

Rebirth gave him a gambler's memory and a monster in his chest. Three years remain until the Gu-Sacrifice Grand Rite, when the furnace relights and the chief comes to collect what he has farmed — a boy grown, at last, into the finest gu the clan ever bred.

The mountain thinks it is raising a harvest.

It is raising a keeper.