The tower room disappeared, and Koida found herself in another time and place entirely. Another life.

“Don’t leave me, Ha-Koi!” Misuru screamed, her fingers digging into Koida’s wrist.

Koida recognized the girl’s smoke-and-tear-streaked face and wine-dark eyes. This was her sister. Her younger sister. Koida was the eldest of the two girls, and her name was not Koida but Ha-Koi.

The meager dirt-floor home she had grown up in stood watching while the surrounding sica fields burned and the gang members who had slaughtered their parents tore the young sisters from one another’s arms.

“Ha-Koi!” Misuru screamed, trying to break free.

“Don’t struggle!” Ha-Koi ordered her little sister. She felt the rough hands dragging her away from Misuru, felt her heart pounding in her chest and her limbs heavy with fear of what was to come, but she maintained a perfectly calm façade for her little sister’s sake. “It won’t be for long. Do what they say. Elder sister won’t leave you, I promise.”

*

The next day the sisters were tied together and taken into a city for the first time in their lives. The gang pushed them through streets bustling with sedans born by strong servants and men and women in finery richer than anything the girls had seen. No one raised an outcry at the sight of two young girls being dragged by rope through the crowds.

At the edge of a canal, a luxurious courtesan boat had been tied. Beautifully women in vibrant silks lounged on couches or walked the deck with men, young and old, handsomely dressed and in peasants’ clothes. The music of a stringed instrument accompanied by a sweet voice drifted from inside.

A painted woman of advanced age received them.

“Madam welcomes the esteemed members of White Tiger Gang,” she said, clasping her hands and bowing with practiced grace. Her eyes skimmed over Ha-Koi and Misuru. “To discuss business would give Madam great pleasure this day. If it pleases you as well, let us step into my office.”

The deck rocked beneath the girls’ feet as they were shoved through a latticed door and down a dark hall. Inside, the singing and music were clearer, and accompanied by the sound of laughter and the clink of cups.

“They’re pretty girls,” the gang leader said when the madam’s office door closed behind him. “Rarely see eyes like that. They hardly fought a lick and not a mark on them. Silver apiece and they’re yours.”

Ha-Koi held Misuru close while the madam walked slowly around them, appraising their hair, skin, and teeth. She lingered longest over the girls’ sparkling amethyst and wine-dark eyes.

“Little country brats,” the madam said with disgust. “It will take weeks to lighten their sun damaged skin and months before they’re properly trained.”

She’s trying to drive down our price, Misuru whispered into Ha-Koi’s mind. See how her beady eyes calculate our value? Is she going to buy us to make us courtesans? Tears trickled down Misuru’s cheeks and dripped onto Ha-Koi’s ripped shirt. I can’t do it again. Last night… Don’t let them do it again, Ha-Koi, please.

Ha-Koi, who had never learned the trick of whispers, could only give Misuru’s shoulder a reassuring squeeze.

The madam she favored with a smile as a bright and warm as she could manage and turned her face a fraction hoping the light of the lamps would show off her eyes to their best advantage.

“Esteemed Madam is most gracious to consider taking on such burdens as Ha-Koi and Misuru. Every day of our lives has been spent laboring in the sica fields. We are strong and healthy, but the only talents we ever learned were music and dance. The snakes in the canes taught me the serpent’s hypnotic twining, and the wind through the sica leaves taught Misuru a thousand beautiful songs.” Here she paused to mimic the graceful bow she had seen the madam produce, though she knew it must look rustic and childish to them. “We apologize for our lack of experience and the trouble it caused Handsome Master and his brothers. Ha-Koi and Misuru promise to learn our art well if Madam condescends to teach us.”

*

“Why did you do that?” Misuru demanded when they were locked away for the night. “Why didn’t you tell Madam we were riddled with disease and unlearned at any disciplines? She would have cast us out, and we could have gone home!”

Every trace of warmth had faded from Ha-Koi’s face. The cold hatred of a venomous snake flowed through her veins.

“If Madam turned down the gang, we would have been dragged to worse and worse houses of repute until we were sold,” she said. “Did you see how Madam treated the gang leader? His men frequent this boat, I’m certain of it. And the way the men on deck treated the courtesans? They are not allowed to be so rough with these women as they were with us. And the courtesans, they’re allowed to refuse if better men have offered for them.”

Misuru began shaking again.

Ha-Koi hugged her sister, finger-combing the younger girl’s tangled hair soothingly.

“On this boat is where we want to be, Misuru,” she said firmly. “You’ll see. White Tiger Gang will pay in blood for treating you this way. Elder sister swears it.”

“They’ll regret treating you as they have, too,” Misuru said in a broken voice. She swallowed hard. “Little sister also swears.”

*

The sisters flowered like lotuses, learning the arts of the comfort trade so fast and so well that they were soon beguiling the hardest hearts in the city. Misuru’s Voice of a Thousand Charms could break laughter from rocks and draw tears from the desert sands. Ha-Koi’s Dance of the Serpent enchanted and enslaved the meanest of snakes—of both the human and scaled varieties.

Word of the sisters’ beauty and talents spread quickly, earning the Madam manifold returns on her investment in the two pitiful little country girls. Within a year, they had become her boat’s greatest draw. Every heart for miles around seemed to be chained to the sisters, and there was not a man’s purse in the city that hadn’t laid out some money for their time.

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One young, hopeless dockworker swore he would kill himself with an exotic adder he had stolen from his employer’s latest shipment if Ha-Koi refused to return his love.

“Give me the adder, and my heart belongs to you,” she promised him.

He presented her with the red deathwhip on the spot and was enthusiastically reassured that Ha-Koi had never felt love or affection for any man but him.

After the young man had left, Ha-Koi returned to her bed cushions and studied the deathwhip. It hissed and slithered inside its viewing jar. Its scales glittered like new-fallen droplets of blood.

If the deathwhip were to bite her… If its venom filled her veins… If she were as deadly as that beautiful creature…

*

Misuru found Ha-Koi curled in her silken sheets, bloody foam on her lips. Little sister begged with her face to the floor and the full range of her Voice of a Thousand Charms for Madam to send for the best physician in the city. The madam, determined that she would not lose one of the two best draws to her courtesan boat, needed little convincing. A physician with a full range of antidotes was hustled aboard the ship against Misuru’s earnings for the next year. No price was too steep for elder sister’s life.

“Tell me you were not trying to leave me,” Misuru whispered when Ha-Koi recovered. Her voice shook and tears slipped from her wine-dark eyes. “Please, Ha-Koi, if you go, take me with you.”

Ha-Koi grasped her sister’s hand.

“I will never leave you, Misuru,” she vowed. The physician’s restorative had purged most of the venom from Ha-Koi’s system, but a small amount remained. She began to cycle the last of it toward her heartcenter, incorporating the deadly toxin into her life energy. She tied herself to that creature’s venom, used it to fill in the places that had gone uncultivated, strengthen and reinforce them. “I was learning a new way to protect little sister. Do as I say, and we will never fear anyone again.”

*

In the years following the sisters’ sale to the courtesan boat, the city’s gang members turned on one another in the streets. Prefects and officials sent assassins against their rivals. Indentures rose up against their masters. Blood flowed until the city ran with it—and so did the land beyond.

The First Prince himself traveled to see the sisters, bringing his retinue of attendants and advisors along. Two days after his return to the royal city, he was found dead of a snakebite in his bedchamber. His most loyal advisor had planted a red deathwhip in his prince’s sheets. The advisor committed suicide before he could be forced to tell where he had gotten the venomous creature.

The day came when the last member of White Tiger Gang was slaughtered by his own son. The sisters’ vow was fulfilled. Their abductors had paid in blood for their crimes.

The sisters were not content to stop there, however. Within Ha-Koi had awakened a hunger for chaos and death, and Misuru had learned to love holding the strings of every puppet in the city. They had not been born to this world for destruction, but forced into the furnace, they took hold of the fire with both hands.

*

One day an immortal, passing a life in frivolous debauchery in the mortal realm, came to see whether the rumors of the sisters’ beauty and talents were true. Disguised as he was, no one on the courtesan boat realized that the Solar Sea King sat among them.

Ha-Koi, however, felt his immortal energy at odds with his youthful face.

You’re correct, Misuru confirmed her sister’s suspicion as she favored the immortal with a demure blush. Look at the age in his eyes. He’s older than the oldest gray-hair I’ve ever entertained.

“Do what I say, and tonight, we live forever,” Ha-Koi told her sister.

From the stage, Ha-Koi scintillated the immortal with sinuous dance, while at his side, Misuru captivated him in charming conversation. The glimmer of jeweled scales dusted across the flawless skin of one sister and the scent of lotus blossoms surrounding the other only intensified the liquor’s effect on the Solar Sea King. He had never denied himself any pleasure, and this would be no exception. When the performances were finished for the night, he cheerfully demanded to pass the time until sunrise alone with the sisters, hang the cost.

“We will see our honored guest in my residence,” Misuru said sweetly. “Please allow your humble admirer to show you the way. Ha-Koi will join us when she has restored herself from her exertions.”

“Tell your sister I don’t care if she’s a bit sweaty,” the Solar Sea King said with a lecherous chuckle. He buried his nose in Misuru’s dark, fragrant hair. “A contrast in scents is as luscious as flavor complexity in a meal.”

Misuru laughed along as if no one could be cleverer. “Oh, Madam would never allow it, honored one. Ha-Koi will not keep us waiting long, however. She is eager to be close to a man of such powerful presence.”

The tiny, luxurious apartments Misuru and Ha-Koi occupied above the stage were connected by a servant’s door, low and wide, made to enter on the knees with trays of food and drinks. From behind the door, Ha-Koi listened to her sister’s whispers and the immortal’s drunken laughter until she was certain the man would not hear the door slide open.

Since the night she had received the deathwhip, Ha-Koi acquired dozens of deadly snakes of every shape and size. Her room was filled with glass viewing jars, each containing a hissing, lethal occupant. Daily, she coaxed the creatures to bite her, absorbed and anchored her soul in their venom.

Quietly, Ha-Koi slid the door aside, revealing Misuru’s flower-filled room. The many rare and exotic lotuses crowded into the small space were a subtler, yet equally deadly mirror of Ha-Koi’s snakes. Venom and poison, fanged predator and lethal blossom, stunning chaos and toxic beauty.

One by one, Ha-Koi emptied her serpents onto Misuru’s floor.

The Solar Sea King had cultivated twenty thousand years of immortal energy, but the feeling of certainty that he could never die and millennia of debauchery had made him slow and stupid. He fought when he realized he was being attacked, but by then he had already suffered dozens of bites. And as he quickly learned, the snakes were not the only venomous creatures in the chamber.

The sisters fell upon him. Misuru disoriented him with her Voice of a Thousand Tongues and activated the floral poison she had been filling his liquor cup with throughout the night. Ha-Koi struck like an adder, lashing out with fangs and claws manifested from her contaminated life energy.

A dazzling storm of flower petals blew on the winds stirred by the Solar Sea King and Ha-Koi’s vicious battle. Ha-Koi fought recklessly, as one for whom life and death were no concern. This chaotic form and lack of fear were impossible predict for an immortal who had spent lifetimes perfecting the rigid meters of his Style of a Thousand Suns, but it could not shield the dancer from the immortal warrior’s skill indefinitely.

Spotting his opening, the Solar Sea King plunged his two-ended Shaft of Sunlight through Ha-Koi’s throat. She dangled limply from the immortal blade. Her amethyst eyes emptied of life. The Solar Sea King pulled the Shaft of Sunlight from her. Ha-Koi’s lifeless body crumpled to the floor.

Misuru screamed, her Thousand Voices discordant and tortured. Blood poured from every ear in the city. Violent madness overtook the mortals for miles in every direction, causing a wave of riotous destruction never seen before and never replicated after. Every blossom in the room shriveled at the sound, releasing its toxins into the air.

The Solar Sea King turned to the sobbing young woman.

“What you have done,” Misuru whispered, the words slithering through the resonant silence like the dead and dried petals of her collected flowers, “let it be brought back onto you a thousand-fold. Let the blade of hatred cut you down where you stand and the claws of destruction rip you from the hearts of those you hold dearest.”

The Solar Sea King stared emotionlessly down at her. “Children who lay snares for gods oughtn’t be surprised when they catch their own feet in their traps.”

He raised the Shaft of Sunlight to pierce her through.

From Ha-Koi’s lifeless body burst a serpentine black dragon covered in glinting, armored scales. Hollow, venom-filled fangs of lavaglass glittered in her jaws. Huge amethyst eyes flared white-hot. Fire erupted from her heartcenter, cutting down the Solar Sea King in half where he stood and making truth of Misuru’s whispered curse.

As the immortal’s ashes settled, Misuru threw her arms around the flying serpent’s wide neck. The Dragon Ha-Koi shed her skin like a snake, returning to human form to reassure her little sister that all was well.

Together, the Sisters of Destruction absorbed the Solar Sea King’s immortal energy and Ascended to immortality.