Chapter 12:

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There was something in the pool.

I saw the shape first — pale, diffuse, the outline of a person dissolved almost to nothing by the liquid around it. Then I registered the hair, floating wide. Then the face, turned up, eyes open.

Hazel.

Not what had been in the coffin, already ruined. This was different. This was Hazel as she’d been before, or close to it — intact, arranged, expression completely blank in the way that is specific to the dead and cannot be imitated by the living. She had been in this pool since the funeral. Long enough for the blood to have begun its work on her.

I pressed the back of my hand to my mouth.

I could not look away and I could not keep looking and I did both at once, my eyes going to her and away and back again in a loop I couldn’t break, while grandmother moved around the pool’s edge with a pole, adjusting, repositioning, with the focused patience of someone arranging furniture.

𝘔𝗼ѕ𝗍 𝗋е𝘢𝘥 𝗍𝗵i𝘀 𝘸e𝘦𝗸 𝘰ո 𝘨a𝗹ո𝗼𝗏𝘦ls.cо𝗺

“Briar, the stupid girl.” Grandmother clicked her tongue. “At least she’ll be useful. Jade from two sources has better color.”

She gestured to my mother, who took Briar’s wrapped body to the pool’s edge, untied it, and tipped it in without ceremony. The liquid received Briar with a low sound, a displacement, a brief disturbance of the surface that quieted quickly.

Grandmother positioned her with the pole. Tilted her chin this way, moved one arm, stepped back to look. Adjusted again. The concentration on her face was complete.

I thought: she has done this many times.

I thought: the girls who disappeared every year. The ones the clan mourned with red coffins and no answers. All of them. How many years had this pool been here.

Then I stopped thinking, because thinking was making it worse and worse was not something I could afford right now.

I watched from behind the jade pillar as the pool began to change. The process was slow — a gradual thickening, the color deepening and concentrating, the surface stilling from liquid to something denser. It took the better part of an hour. I did not move for any of it.

At the end, the pool was solid.

Red jade. A single piece, flawless, the two shapes inside it visible only as faint shadows — suggestions of form rather than form itself. Grandmother knelt at the edge and ran her palm across the surface, slowly, checking for cracks with the sensitivity of long practice.

“Better than last year’s,” she said. “Much better. The color is excellent.”

She held a night pearl over it and examined the depths. Satisfied, she stood.

“A little polishing. Then it ships.”

So the red jade beds existed. They were real, and people bought them and slept on them believing they preserved youth, and perhaps they did, and the price of that youth was this: girls, dissolved, solidified, exported. The mine was not in the mountain. The mine had always been the village itself.

I pressed my back to the pillar and shut my eyes and tried to calculate. How long had grandmother been doing this. How old was she, actually. What she was, exactly — whether there was a word for it or whether the word hadn’t needed to exist before now.

One thing: she was running out of granddaughters.

The thought arrived with an unpleasant clarity that was almost useful.

I was still working out what to do with it when something brushed my calf.

My hand came up to my mouth fast, and the rest of me went rigid — but not fast enough. My foot had shifted, just slightly, and the jade step rang out one clean note into the silence of the cave.

The sound went everywhere at once.

“Who’s there?”

Grandmother spun, the knife already in her hand, blood still dark on the blade — Briar’s knife, the one she’d pulled from her sash the night she died. She raised the night pearl and turned in a slow arc, methodical, listening for the direction of the echo. The cave scattered it in all directions — she couldn’t pinpoint it, not yet — but she was moving toward the pillars.

Toward me.

I pressed myself flat against the jade pillar and stopped breathing, and watched her come.

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