Someone was calling Liao, like a wasp buzzing in his ear, and the threat of pain if he didn’t answer. Pain flashed through his bleary-eyed sight. Someone had slapped him. He barely felt the blow, just a numbness that he was more than happy to surrender into.

The voice was louder now, a hideous screech that cut into his ears as four figures stood over him, like watchers over a coffin. Liao smiled at that. Someone slapped him again, and this time he felt it, though less forceful, a different hand.

“Brother! Wake up!” shrieked his sister, Feia.

“Can he move?” said the old hag beside her, the Oracle.

“He will live,” came a deep baritone belonging to the monk, Renshu. “But he'll be too weak to walk for too long.”

Liao mumbled, “What are you—why…”

“Liao,” a woman said. “You must move.”

The prince turned his neck to see his mother. Cold-green eyes, unnatural in their brightness, gleamed in the dimness of the shuttered room.

“Mother?” His senses were becoming painfully clearer. “Why are you all here?”

The Empress raised a hand-held mirror, revealing Liao's face. His skin was pale, showing the veins under his skin, blackened, as if a foulness was spreading in his body. Bloodshot eyes, dark orbs that didn't show his brown irises, pitch-black, stared back at him. The brew he’d drunk did this?

Liao groaned, his head a beating drum being punctured repeatedly. Pain shot through every point in his body.

“Liao,” his sister knelt beside him. “You have to leave this place. We discovered you like this a few hours ago. Renshu, the Shadai monk, remember? He gave you an antidote for whatever poison you drank. I’m glad you’re alive. But you have to leave, now.”

“We don’t have much time,” Renshu said. “They will be here soon.”

“They’re here?” Liao asked. “The viceroys?”

The Oracle and his mother glanced at each other.

Feia said, "The gates opened for them. They call themselves the People's Army."

“We must move,” the monk continued. “I’ll carry him, but in his condition there won’t be enough time to avoid the soldiers.”

“The Cadrian embassy,” Feia blurted. “It won’t be the first place they’ll look, but they’ll look there eventually…”

“There’s a hidden passageway connecting each building in this district below,” their mother said. “You can reach the city through the tunnels. I’ll take you there.”

Renshu scooped Liao up, ignoring his weak protests. Carrying him out of his room, he saw Captain Huli's face harden at his appearance.

“Huli, stay on guard. We need them to think the Prince is still here,” his mother said.

“Yes, Empress.”

Liao peered past Renshu’s thick arms to see the man he’d regarded as his father. Huli would act as a decoy. He knew the captain’s fate in the end, vision or no vision – death from a blade, or a headsman’s axe, it was still a bloody end. He howled soundlessly at the sheer suddenness of it all. His vision was coming true, and his world was falling apart with it. He wasn’t ready, and he was too weak by whatever brew he’d drunk to do anything at all.

The Empress moved quickly despite her gilded green dress, gliding through the halls with a regal authority Liao had never witnessed. No drunkenness, no snideness, just assured purpose.

Low-hanging red dyed lanterns lined the corridors, refuge from the shadows with their ruby light.

Clinking in their golden armor, imperial guards charged towards them with their pikes. His mother spun in a deadly dance, catching the haft of one polearm, twirling and slashing through them. She thrust an open palm to one man's chest, careening him across the hall to crash against its end.

"Who to fight?" Liao muttered, too numb to even feel surprised at his mother’s power.

Renshu answered as he followed the Empress, Liao still in his arms, "Anyone that tries to kill you, gongwei."

The Oracle took a sword from one of the dead men, Feia close behind.

"They know of the passageway," the Empress said. "No guards are meant to be posted in this wing."

"What do we do?" Renshu questioned.

"If you can still get to the embassy," Feia said, "perhaps you'll find refuge there, even if it's brief. Liao needs to be disguised as someone they wouldn't suspect if he must get out of the district. Who better than a Cadrian?"

Their mother turned away. "Let's go, then. This way will take you to the embassy."

The corridor ended with a stone wall. It seemed so until the Empress lifted its weight, like a hidden lever. The wall must have weighed at least thirty-five stones, and her slim figure stood nine stones at most. Liao had read of the potent strength elixirs gave, but had never witnessed such feats. The stone mechanism grated with the woman's trembling arms.

"Shadai, go with my son," she said, voice strained with her effort. "Turn right when you reach the forked path."

Liao reached out for his sister as the Oracle held her back.

"We'll watch the city, brother," Feia whispered. "Stay alive until then."

The stone wall slammed back down, closing between them, only darkness found on the other side.