Cat smell! Run!

Giant shadow moving, paw smack.

Dazed. Scrambling up. Run!

Different furry monster. Paw smack. Sharp teeth.

Hurt! Hurt hurt hurt.

More sharp teeth. Being bitten, being lifted, being dropped, paw smack.

Run! Hole in wall is right there! Limp, limp, limp.

Sharp teeth. Being bitten, being smacked. Lots of monsters. Lots of paws.

Dazed, hurting, bleeding. Hurting too much to move.

Smack smack smack smack smack.

Blackness.

----------------------------------------

This was really too much! I fumed to myself when I regained consciousness in the archival box. Reincarnating me not once, but twice in the cats’ spy school! The cat spirits weren’t even good at pretending to be mortal cats. Their torment of me had been way too coordinated, way too sadistic. Only an awakened creature could be so deliberately cruel.

I should know.

Had my victims in Cassius’ court felt the way I had as a rat trapped in a circle of cats? With safety right before their eyes, believing they had a chance of escape despite their wounds (either figurative or literal, depending on the person), dragging themselves towards it, nearly reaching it, before the paw came down and their last hope was chewed to nothing? Was that how Marcius had felt? Aurelia?

Cassius himself?

No. No no no. Who cared about Cassius? He was doing just fine, getting his revenge with a, well, vengeance. Aurelia, too, was doing well in her new life as an influential star goddess. She even had a new love interest who was worth so much more than Cassius, in my opinion if not the consensus of Heaven. And my opinion was the one that mattered.

But Marcius…. He hadn’t adjusted well to life after death, had he? He’d applied that same reform-minded spirit to Heaven and been kicked out for it, which, when you thought about it, was akin to execution for a god.

I wish you’d succeeded, I thought for the first time. Cassius would never have been confirmed as Assistant Director of anything if you’d succeeded. Heaven would be a better place. For me, for Flicker, for Aurelia, for everyone under its control, which is to say, everyone on Earth too. You should have played the game better, Marcius, or whatever or whoever you are now. You should have won.

Funny, wasn’t it, to find myself rooting for my old enemy?

I was entertaining myself by remembering all the tedious things he’d said when a line of light fell across me. Wood squeaked. The line turned into a rectangle, then a square, then the open top of my box. Flicker’s face filled it.

Oh, hey, Flicker! Is it time already?

It didn’t feel like it was time. I’d re-coalesced, but I still felt raw, as if I were one big patch of tender new skin all over and throughout my soul.

A finger cut his lips in half. “Shh. It’s not time. But there’s someone to whom you should talk, and this is the safest way to do it.”

The Goddess of Life? I asked, but he didn’t answer.

His face disappeared and was replaced by his hands, reaching in and scooping me up. I flopped. I couldn’t seem to hold my shape as a ball. Flicker tucked me into his sleeve, slid the box back onto the shelf, and left the archives. Unable to see through the fabric, I stayed quiet until the drop in temperature told me that we were outside.

Where are we going?

He shushed me again, then mumbled, “To the Garden of Eternal Spring. It was her idea.”

The quality of his footsteps changed, picking up a hollow echo. I peeked out of his sleeve and found that we were crossing an arched bridge over a lake that gleamed as black as I did. Cherry trees in full bloom rustled in the night breeze, and petals, bleached of pinkness by the moonlight, heaped up on the ground like snowdrifts. It was probably spectacular in the daytime, but at night, the cold, white light lent everything a hard cast.

A woman’s figure awaited on a bench under a cherry tree. Even before she tipped up her chin at our approach, I could tell that she wasn’t the Goddess of Life. She was the Star of Reflected Brightness. Aurelia.

Well, this was going to be awkward.

“Good evening, Flicker,” she said, and her voice was as I remembered it, right down to the undercurrent of tension. “Did it go well? Did you bring her?”

He sat down next to her gingerly, as if the bench might snap under his weight. “Yes, and yes.” He tipped his arm, and I slithered out of his sleeve to pool between them. I strained until I rounded my top, but that was all I could manage.

Aurelia looked down at me. “Well. We meet again, Piri.”

Had I ever heard her address me without that edge of stress in her voice? Maybe at the very beginning, when she had first welcomed me to her court.

I wasn’t up to my usual dipping bow, but with an effort, I flattened myself and popped back into a dome. Flicker said you wished to see me? How may I be of assistance to your Heavenly Ladyship?

It never hurt to act polite. I’d always addressed the Empress Aurelia with the exact degree of courtesy required by court etiquette.

To my surprise, it was Flicker who answered. “Actually, it was my idea. To have the two of you meet. I thought...I think it’s good for you to talk. Because...because I think we all want the same thing.”

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We did? I peered up at the underside of Aurelia’s jaw, which seemed rather set.

Do we? I asked lightly, hoping to prompt him into elaborating on what the empress I’d murdered could possibly want badly enough to ally with me.

She didn’t utter a word.

“Well, we – all of us – have been, uh, experiencing a challenging time. With the new Assistant Director. The Star of Heavenly Joy,” Flicker stammered.

I couldn’t help it. At the image of the three of us – and while I was at it, why not throw in Glitter and the rest of the clerks too? – forming a support group that met every time I died so we could gripe about Cassius, a peal of laughter rolled out of me. It tinkled across the garden and was muffled by the cherry blossom petals.

“I told you this was a bad idea.” Aurelia gathered her skirts and rose.

Flicker grabbed her hand and tugged her back down. “Wait! Give her a chance. She’s changed, she really has. Piri, why did you laugh just now?”

Oh. I was just picturing all of us holding regular sessions to talk about how much we hate Cassius and want him to –

I stopped before I could say, be deposed, because that was precisely the topic of the secret meetings I’d encouraged in his palace. They had been particularly useful for identifying competent would-be reformers so they could be removed.

“Want him to what?” Aurelia asked in a hard voice. “Pray tell, what right do you have to hate the man you drove to hateful excess?”

I couldn’t help it. Such an emphatic sigh whooshed out of me that I deflated into a flat skin before I puffed myself back up.

You know that wasn’t me. He always had it in him. Why else would Lady Fate have sent me to remove him?

I could still see only the underside of her jaw, but it definitely clenched. “We all have the capacity to act in cruel and selfish ways. It’s less about being kind and virtuous by nature, and more about controlling those base instincts. You unleashed his. You encouraged him to indulge them. You told him it was normal and acceptable, no, his right as emperor to be as savage and capricious as he wanted. I assure you, he did not behave that way before he met you.”

It wasn’t entirely untrue, but I refused to concede anything to a former enemy I’d defeated. Graciousness in victory was a thing of children’s tales, not a survival strategy in the Wilds or the Imperial Court or anywhere, really.

You forget the act that precipitated his downfall. He defaced a temple. And not just any temple, but a temple to Lady Fate, the goddess who sees all of our futures. Would you call that the act of a man – and yes, he might have been an emperor and a Son of Heaven at the time, but he was still a human man – who exercised self-restraint?

“I grant you, that was an ill-judged act which he regretted deeply afterwards.” (I highly doubted it.) “But it was a momentary lapse, never to be repeated.”

Only because Lady Fate only had the one temple in the City of Dawn Song for Cassius to deface.

Some lapses are more than just lapses. Some “lapses” reveal what we are at the core of our souls. And that was one of them.

“It was a poem, Piri! A trifling poem!”

Poems were never trifling business in the Empire, and she knew it. Poems were expressions of self, masks for political discontent, and harbingers of impending rebellion. And the one that Cassius had written on the wall of Lady Fate’s temple, opposite her altar, in his own hand –

He dared to imply that she was no better than an ordinary woman. That a goddess was nothing more than a potential consort for a human emperor.

“He meant it as the highest praise he could offer for her beauty!”

But that’s the point! It revealed that in the depths of his soul, he believed that he had the right to judge her beauty! He – a mortal man!

“He didn’t mean it that way – ”

Aurelia stopped, because of course he had. Subconsciously, at the very least. Generations of his forebears had succeeded to the throne and been granted a chimera to recognize them as Sons and Daughters of Heaven, the children of the Jade Emperor in spirit if not in fact. It had gone to their heads. They had come to believe that, as the children of the ruler of Heaven, they stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the gods. And if you were the equal of a goddess, then why couldn’t you compose a poem inviting her to adorn your back palace?

He did mean it that way, and you know it. I didn’t raise my voice. I didn’t need to. I daresay you knew it even then, or before. You and Marcius were already trying so hard to rein in his excesses when I arrived, weren’t you? I didn’t need to plant any corruption in his soul. It was already there. All I had to do was free him from your influence. He did the rest.

“He did not do all of the rest. You poisoned him against any ministers who tried to warn him that you were spending too much, that you were lying to him, pretending to have his best interests at heart. You pushed him to order their executions. You invented unimaginable, unspeakable ways to murder them. You ate Marcius’ heart!”

I had.

Knowing what you do now about souls and reincarnation, is it really that much worse to eat the heart of a human than that of a chicken?

She fell silent. I glanced up at Flicker, the agent of reincarnation, but he was holding very still and didn’t seem inclined to take either side.

I let myself rise and fall in a shrug. Very well, then. I admit, it wasn’t all him. I was responsible for a portion of it. Perhaps I was a little...overenthusiastic in my spending. Perhaps I shouldn’t have pushed Marcius to kill himself.

There was no “perhaps” about it – I hadn’t known it then, because Lady Fate had not seen fit to warn me that some humans were off limits – but Marcius had been meant to found a new, more virtuous dynasty. I’d warped his fate by driving him into a corner from which the only exit was death. It hadn’t been personal – well, yes, fine, it had been. But he’d been so tedious, droning on and on about responsible government and the duties of a just ruler and, if I were being honest with myself, making me feel just a tad guilty whenever I saw his disapproving scowl.

Maybe that was why he’d had to go.

“There is no ‘perhaps’ about it. Marcius was a good man. He would have been a great emperor.”

As he was a great god? I couldn’t help needling her, even though I hadn’t intended to. It just slipped out from force of long habit.

Aurelia froze. She knew I was right. I hadn’t seen her at that audience with the Goddess of Life, when Marcius had been stripped of his divinity and cast back into the cycle of reincarnation. I hadn’t seen her lift a finger to save him.

“Piri,” said Flicker, almost sternly. “Don’t turn this on her – ”

“No, she’s right.” To our surprise, Aurelia interrupted his defense. She drew a deep breath and let it out again, slowly. “She’s right. I didn’t try to save Marcius when he was the Star of Scholarly Song. I was a newly-made goddess, and I was learning the ways of the Heavenly Court, and the Queen Mother of the West had hinted that I might become Assistant Director of her Bureau one day if I continued as I was….”

“You were a newly-made goddess,” Flicker repeated, stressing the words. “You couldn’t have been expected to save him. The most that would have happened was that you would have gotten expelled from Heaven yourself.”

“He was a newly-made god, and he tried to remake Heaven.”

“And was expelled for it without changing a thing. Don’t blame yourself!” Over me, Flicker reached out to grab Aurelia’s hands. “You’re doing far more here and now than he is, down on Earth as mindless animals!”

I watched, fascinated, as she pulled her hands away, rejecting the comfort he offered. “No. I haven’t been doing anything here. Not enough, anyway.”

Flicker opened his mouth to deny it, which wasn’t what she wanted to hear, or the truth, so I scooted sideways and bumped his thigh. When he glanced down at me, frowning, I wobbled from side to side in a “Don’t.” He thought for a moment and then conceded, “Perhaps so, but that was why I wanted the two of you to meet. Because what we want to do is change the way things are, isn’t it? And who better than – than – ” Words failed him as he groped for a way to describe me and what I’d done.

An ironic smile lifted Aurelia’s lips. “Than the former nine-tailed fox who changed the way things are on Earth forever?”

“Well, uh….”

“You’re right. You’re right. Flicker, will you let me speak to her in private, please?”