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Night was a shroud wrapped around Zishu's shoulders, cloaking her in enough shadow that she could pass unnoticed, the grass of the cemetery springing back into place when she lifted her feet as if she had never stepped there. She was swift and silent, untraceable in her movements, and her skills were only lacking in that she couldn't persuade himself that she was anywhere else, as much as she would like to.
"The whisper of the ocean..." She murmured to herself, picking her way through the gravestones. That was where she would be if she had the choice. That was where she could be, if she managed to pull off this job. "Soft sand, hot sun... the smell of salt and too much sun cream..."
It was a far cry from the scent that currently teased her nostrils. Much of the incense offered by visitors during the day had burned to their tails, the last of the smoke curling around Zishu's ankles in a dying whisper, and the clean odour was slowly being usurped by the smell of soil, damp and acidic after rain, and of the dead. Perhaps she was particularly sensitive to that sort of thing, Zishu wondered, shining the tiny beam of her torch over the names inscribed on the rows of tablets. She didn't exactly have a frame of reference to know whether the scent of ash and decomposition became stronger in the twilight hours.
It wasn't any of the modern graves that she was after, thankfully. She had robbed those before, retreiving family heirlooms and sacreligiously hidden data portals from the insides of urns or the stiff grip of peeling knuckles. Those jobs were the most unpleasant, and she incinerated each pair of gloves after, unable to rid the fabric of the stench and the stains. No, this job - her last job - was something grander. It was the kind of grave robbing that she had read about in books: the sort of glamour that she had once anticipated as the right hand woman of someone as powerful as Helian Yi, before she came to understand that her exposure to espionage had been heavily sanitised by popular media. She thought of the thrill her younger self would have felt upon receiving the assignment, and laughed at the tragedy that she was now too old and fatigued to want anything but its end. Her body might have once been something carved out of marble, but it had eroded beyond all recognition, storms and the pollution of ambition she never should have entertained wearing her down to coarse, scarred rock.
Zishu didn't know how old the tomb built into the cliff face at the back of the cemetery was. It was the kind of thing she used to research, believing that she could never be too prepared, but now she only cared about whether she would need a spade or a mattock. This time, she had brought a selection of fine-tipped chisels; it was probably someone important, and while no one but the family would cry for the desecration of a smaller grave, sometimes not even then, taking a pickaxe to a landmark might draw public attention. There was little chance that Helian Yi would release her from his hook then, his distaste for her pallour after chemotherapy be damned. She needed to get in and out without a trace - if no one had cause to open the tomb, then they would never find out that it had been robbed.
Unfortunate, then, that she arrived at the entrance to the tomb to find the soft spot in the rock already exploited. It crumbled under her fingertips, chalky and rough, and barely noticeable next to the inelegant goring of a sledgehammer against the marble door. A landmark, most likely thousands of years old, destroyed with the reckless abandon of someone who was either a complete amateur, or who had absolutely nothing to lose by laying claim to the crime.
Zishu sighed. This made her job harder, but easier too. Robbing the living was much more trouble than robbing the dead, but at least once she got away, this mess would eclipse any tracks that she might leave. She slipped through the gap that had been torn through the mausoleum wall with barely a breath, switching out the bevelled chisel in her hands for something sharper from her toolbelt. She fingered the edge of the skew, satisfied when it drew blood, and then quickly wrapped first her finger and the blade in leather, careful not to spill.
The mausoleum was not built for the living. Zishu had to stoop as she crept deeper, the smoothed surface of the limestone wall cool against her back. Below, she could hear a low grunting, timed in the vigorous, echoing beats of a pickaxe on stone.
"Fuck's sake..." Zishu said, relishing the opportunity to chide someone, even if it was only in the stifled darkness. "Hasn't she heard of a bolster? A crowbar, perhaps?"
The grunting stopped. The sigh that followed was cavalier, theatrical; the slurring of a flute through an easy arpeggio.
"I have," an airy voice carried up through the mausoleum, making Zishu stop in her tracks. It was just a few meters east, but several more below - there must be a sharp drop approaching. Zishu's partner in crime didn't bother to shout, knowing that the loftiness of where she stood would lift her voice into the narrow opening where Zishu stood. "But precision work takes half the fun out of it, don't you think?"
Zishu sighed. She tucked the skew inside her sleeve and followed the narrow path east with heavy footsteps, feeling along the wall until she found the drop and then lowering herself as gracefully as she could manage - that is, not very - into the main hall of the tomb. It had already been lit up with torches, one at the intruder's feet and another strapped to her head. Zishu had to blink against the brightness of the beam - another amateur move, but something told her that she should keep her guard up anyway - and when the coloured auras finally faded and the intruder came into view, saliva caught on the laughter that she held back in her throat.
On anyone else, a headtorch and overalls over an elaborate lace blouse, already stained with the grime that could only come from a tomb, would have looked like a terrible halloween costume, but this woman somehow managed to wear it like high fashion. She leaned against the splintered stone coffin as if she was perched on the arm of a gilded throne. Underneath the headlight, it was difficult to see her eyes - Zishu could only make out the whites of them, wide and gleaming, and she pressed her arm tight against her hip, feeling the hardness of the skew handle as an anchor against the pull of her gaze.
"This isn't where I'd be if I was looking for fun," she responded, taking care to keep her voice light and even. Her back was to the wall - a solid wall, with nothing behind it, she had tested - and there was nowhere in the room that the intruder could go where she wouldn't see. Not unless she dropped the lights, and she'd have to do both at the same time, and Zishu's own torch was less than a second away...
"Where would that be, then?" the intruder asked, blinking owlishly. Giving the impression of carelessness, she raised a hand to brush her hair behind her ears, two fingers loosing their grip on the wrapped package in her palm. Of course, she would be here for the exact same thing that Helian Yi had ordered her to retrieve. There must be any number of priceless artefacts in here, and yet only one of them seemed to be worth the moral cost of desecration.
"Anywhere else," Zishu offered. It was a meagre offering, but the intruder - if she could be called that, since Zishu was here on the same business - took it with delight, showing teeth brighter than the torchlight behind a set of full, dark lips. "Preferably somewhere sunny, and warm. These places have a really unique type of coldness."
"Wet," the intruder spoke up, familiar, understanding. "Clammy. Like the hands of the dead are reaching up from the river. Like they fell off the bridge."
Zishu nodded once. "Exactly. Not my idea of fun."
"And yet, you're here. Why is that, Miss...?"
"You don't need my name."
"But I'd like it."
Zishu took a step forward, and the intruder spun around to the other side of the coffin in a blur of movement, the silk of her blouse rustling in the rheumy air. The light spun as she did, casting her shadow large and looming across the high wall of the mausoleum, like a giant dancing across the night sky. It made Zishu dizzy, searching for the stars. When she stopped, her hand was behind her back, and Zishu could not stop her own gaze from flickering to it, cursing as the intruder's eyes widened in recognition.
"I have what you want," she said, gleeful.
"I don't want it," Zishu countered, just to be contrary. "Someone else does."
"Do you know what it is?"
"No."
"If you did, you'd want it."
"If I did, I think I'd want it less."
There was nothing that Zishu had been commanded to steal that had been worth stealing. The ghosts she had disturbed - the ghosts she had created - would haunt her for whatever was left of her days. All of the power that Helian Yi had amassed thanks to her help, and all of the rewards she had reaped in his shadow... it had left her empty. She didn't care at all what was bound so tightly, hidden in a tomb centuries ago from the greedy claws of the types of people who hired her. All she cared about was that it was her ticket to freedom.
The intruder took in her words with pursed lips, cheeks hollowed in contemplation. It was as if Zishu had given her a peach pit to suckle on; Zishu watched her tongue prod the inside of her dimples with interest; lifted her arm slowly to scratch the nape of her neck, just below her ponytail.
"Are we going to have a problem, Miss..?" She asked, feeling the blunted end of the skew handle fall into her palm.
"Wen Kexing. I certainly hope not."
They moved at the same time. Zishu gripped the skew, vaulting over the coffing and bringing it around in a tight arc to where Wen Kexing's ribcage had been only moments ago, but now there was only empty air. Beams of light and shadow oscillated around the room, but Zishu didn't have the time to be dizzy with it. She chased the delicate flutter of Wen Kexing's blouse, tearing the sleeve in one fluid motion; grasping at nothing the next.
"Ouch!" Wen Kexing said, as if the blood that spilled from her forearm was little more than a paper cut. "That hurt. For something you don't want, you're vicious about getting hold of it."
Zishu's brain rattled inside her skull. She should have been at home, resting, perhaps vomiting into her bathtub with a bucket of ice chips beside her, but she was here, because she had to be. She threw her weight forward, intending to jab the skew so far into Wen Kexing's shoulder blade that she could force her to drop the package, but Wen Kexing rolled to the side, and Zishu hit rock instead with a resounding clang.
"It's a ticket," Zishu growled, frustratingly breathless. She was too old for this. Too sick. It wasn't supposed to be this hard. "I need it."
"A ticket to what?" Wen Kexing asked. "I need it too. Perhaps more than you...won't you be considerate of me?"
"Not a chance!" Zishu launched herself at Wen Kexing again. When she was done with this, she would mourn the fact that she didn't have the time to savour the fight. Wen Kexing moved with no predictable pattern, no discipline or training, and yet Zishu felt as if they had sparred for years together. It was thrilling, to find someone so on her level - above her level as it was right now. She was a match for Zishu at her fittest.
She would probably lose this match. Despite Zishu's speed, Wen Kexing was one step ahead of her, her eyes sparkling in the sporadic light of the torch on the floor that she had sent spinning. She held the package over Zishu's head as if they were playing in the schoolyard and it was nothing but a trinket, making Zishu grit her teeth, roll her eyes and laugh all at once.
"I'm not giving up my freedom for some huli ji-" Zishu muttered - cut herself off when she realised she was in earshot. Wen Kexing's eyes widened, her lips curving in the slightest of smiles. Of course she would take that as a compliment.
It was just a game to her, but it was one Zishu knew how to play as well. Wen Kexing lowered her gaze for just a second - the light from her head torch glanced over Zishu's worn and muddy boots - a loose chip of the marble coffin lay right beside her. Seizing the opportunity, she kicked it high, and when Wen Kexing made a soft gasp of surprise and moved to dodge, Zishu threw herself at her with all her strength, pinning her fast against the wall. Kexing was taller than her, but willowy, and Zishu used the weight of her chest and hips to keep her restrained, her nose pushing up against Wen Kexing's lips when Zishu raised her chin triumphantly.
"You let your guard down," she said, smug, teaching. Then she realised that she must have let her guard down, too, because she didn't resist at all when Wen Kexing kissed her.
It was a dirty kiss. They both tasted like dirt and must and god-knows-what else had calcified in this tomb, and neither one of them was ready to give up the fight. Their teeth clashed, sending a tremor right up through Zishu's nose, and she squeezed the hip she had caught hold of tightly, half growling in protest. Wen Kexing's small breasts felt good resting on the flesh of hers, pressed hard against Wen Kexing's ribcage, enjoying the friction as they moved together. Zishu felt a tongue press into her mouth, heedless of the dust that chapped her lips, and she thought this is it.
They didn't kiss for long. They kissed for too long, the corpse of some long-dead, once-revered nobleman playing voyeur to wet sounds and breathless panting. Zishu let herself dream idly, stupidly, of bending this complete stranger over against the crypt; if their movements together would be just as inevitable seeking pleasure as they were delivering pain. Then she found what she was looking for, and she pulled away.
Wen Kexing's headtorch had slipped on her head. She finally looked as ridiculous as she should have done from the start; only, Zishu couldn't laugh. Her mouth was open, eyes lidded in a sultry, ravished surprise, and the smear of dirt across her cheek was definitely from Zishu's own. Zishu takes note of the heat in her own stomach; of the low, thrumming tension that ran even lower, that craved - something that Zishu wouldn't let herself have, not right now. She acknowledged it, and dragged her focus back onto something that sat higher on her shoulders: the feeling of victory as she brandished the package she had extracted from Kexing's loose and eager fingers.
"Thank you, Lao Wen," she said. Wen Kexing bit her lip until Zishu swallowed; laughed, shook her head.
"You're welcome," she replied. They hadn't kissed so thoroughly that she should sound that wrung out. No, she was performing for Zishu, offering her a glimpse of something that she could have had, if she had had more time. Her acquiesence was more of a gift than either of them would acknowledge. "Will I see you again?"
"If we're fated," Zishu replied. She didn't tell her that she hoped they would be. In many ways, she hoped they wouldn't.
Zishu left Wen Kexing to her bones in the mausoleum, slipping out of the cemetery with a full bag and an even fuller heart. She would deliver this to Helian Yi, and then she would be free.
The sun enveloped Zishu with its warmth, a cloak that she could finally rest in. It bore down on her with an overwhelming reassurance, the gaze of one large, scalding eye that would never lose sight of her. She closed her eyes, enjoying the flare of neon pink that flashed behind her lids, and exhaled a long, deep sigh into the dry air. It was a sigh that contained all of her troubles; the passing of oxygen and the severing of a contract. She might become a cloud, she thought, and float away in the sky, chasing the sun until she could drink her fill over the ocean.
"Look, jie, that woman is falling asleep on the wall! She's going to get robbed, or at least sunburned, and turn into a lobster."
The young girl's gleeful laughter was enough to make Zishu smile even as the subject of her mockery, but it froze on her face when the woman she was speaking to responded. Her voice was familiar, though it held the warmth of the sunlight they were reunited in now, instead of the chill of the night they first met.
"She's only sunbathing, Ah-Xiang. Why don't you ask her?"