Page 52 of These Immortal Truths
The thought is shattered faster than it could fully form.
There is a massacre on the beach, screams and blood spilling from the houses like ink over silk—a permanent stain spreading over Anna’s heart faster than she can blot it away.
She is too horrified to hide it.
Ching Shih catches her look. “You don’t approve?”
Time touches everything.Khiran said.
But Anna doesn’t want to lose herself to it. Her heart is scarred, but seeing the violence on the shore has shaken her. Tragedies no longer carry the same heartbreak they once did, but crueltydoes. She can’t look at people suffering at the hands of their brethren and not feel sick at the sight. She can’t look at Shih’s pirates carrying braided heads over their shoulders like trophies, the blood smearing over their chests and staining their hands, and not see the horror in it.
This isn’t a battle. It’s a massacre. “They’re just people. They’re innocent.”
Shih scoffs; a soft sound for a sharp woman. “This is a village willing to sell its daughters to a brothel and its sons to a life of servitude.” Her gaze is edged with warnings. “Why do they deserve my mercy?”
Anna knows better than to believe she wants an answer, but there’s an urgency prodding at her heart that won’t allow her to drop it. “How do you know?”
“Because they are all cut from the same rotting silk. Why should I give them the mercy they denied me?” A scream rises over the rest, bleeding across the water before it’s swallowed up. Shih catches Anna’s wince, and shakes her head. “They will bend you till you break, Táohua. If we are to rise in this world, we must bite at the hands that would hold us down.”
Anna goes quiet, heart in her throat. She would rather fall than to rise up using the bloodied bodies of innocents to climb, but she says nothing. That night, and many nights after, she dreams of echoed cries and bloody oceans, and wakes with tears and sweat stinging her eyes.
Anna knows she can no longer stay, but she isn’t sure how to leave. Ching Shih is as merciful as she is cruel, and Anna isn’t confident that she can navigate those waters. She spends weeks making plan after plan, from slipping quietly ashore the next time there’s a raid to simply asking the captain for permission to leave. In the end, the choice is made for her.
Rough hands push her against the wall, wood biting into her shoulders, snapping at her spine. They’re below deck—far from sight and sound of the other crew mates—and Anna knows even before the threat leaves Gang’s mouth what he wants.
His breath is in her ear, his body pinning her to the wall. “Scream and I’ll kill you. Tell anyone and I’ll kill you.”
Anna thinks of the long-deceased man who threatened her with death, whose hand pressed against her throat much like now. He had left afraid but unscathed, before burning down the life she built.
They will bend you till you break.
Anna won’t bend, won’t break, not with this. She claws at his face, stomps at his feet and kicks at his calves. “The captain will have your head,” she hisses, because Ching Shih is a study in opposites, shows mercy in the same breath as ruthlessness. It will not be Anna’s blood that coats her blade.
Gang laughs, putrid and dark. “Who’s going to accuse me? You’ll be at the bottom of the ocean before she even realizes you’re gone.”
The tearing of cloth, the sudden hiss of air at her chest, and the painful pause before he scrambles away, shouting words that Anna doesn’t recognize. She knows that even if the captain will surely have his head, that doesn’t mean her own is safe. She’s not sure if there are any limits to her immortality, any weaknesses, but beheading seems like a foolish one to test. The sea laps at the ship walls, a painful reminder that being thrown into its depths is perhaps the worse fate of the two.
Her hands fumble with the torn cloth at her chest, gripping itclosed as she hurries to the deck. Gang is already speaking to the crew, his words leaving him faster than Anna’s frazzled mind can translate. The wide berth they give, thelooks, aren’t nearly as difficult to interpret.
Anna can feel herself shrinking, shoulders hunching, as she takes a step back. Centuries have passed, the land and sea beneath her feet has changed, but this has not. May never.
They will bend you till you break.
But Anna has nearly six hundred years they will never live, has seen renaissances and plagues, fields of lavender and famine filled streets. She has lived through the same histories they only hear about, has called the god they only know bits and pieces about, a friend.
They will bend you till you break,Shih warned her. But once, so long ago, a shapeshifting god held out his hand and assured her,Fear is for mortals.
Her spine straightens, her chin rising to meet their stares with a determination that seems to make some of them falter. She has laughed with many of these men, has told stories under the stars and shared the same meals. Let them look—let them be afraid—but let them see she is above all of it.
Ching Shih emerges from her quarters, drawn out by the noise. “What is going on here?”
Gang is the first to speak, the words leaving him with the same sharpness as the way he points in Anna’s direction. “Captain, she carries lesions! We must go to shore and bury her immediately before the evil in her spreads!”
She looks down at him, her eyes dark with suspicion. “And you know this, how?” He goes silent, but there’s an edge to her gaze that makes his answer meaningless. She turns to Anna. “Did he force himself on you?”
She pulls the collar of her shirt tighter, but holds Gang’s gaze and keeps her voice level. He deserves no mercy from her. “He tried.”
Shih tips her head, a silent order, and Gang is grabbed by two of his fellow crew mates. He is pale, trembling with fear, but he doesn’tfight their hold. Even if he did, he would have nowhere to run—there is nothing but open ocean surrounding them.
