Chapter 6: The Pool at Night

The spirit pool lay white under the moon, and the mist on it moved.

Every dawn the inner disciples sat on its rim and drew that mist in through their roots.

At night it belonged to nobody.

Lian waded in with an empty bucket and a ladle.

The mist touched her bare arms and slid off them.

Clean qi would never take in her body again, and here was the proof of it.

The shallows were knee-deep, then waist-deep, and then the bottom dropped away.

She filled her lungs and went under.

The ash in the deep middle lay thick as river clay, dark gray, and warm as a hearth stone.

She dug the bucket into it with both hands and kicked back up.

On the rim, she sat with the bucket between her knees and drank one ladle.

It was nothing like the buckets.

It went down, and the gray went up her arms past the elbows to her shoulders.

She pressed her forehead to the stone rim and breathed through her teeth until the worst of it passed.

When she lifted her head, Zhuo Ming was standing on the far side of the pool.

"Put the ladle down," he said.

She put it down.

He walked around the rim to her, not fast.

In the moonlight he could see everything: her soaked hemp robe, the bucket, and the gray lines from her wrists to her shoulders.