Southern Archives: A Plot Within a Plot

Zhang Haiyan remembered everything.

He remembered the blood on the deck of the Nan'an, slick beneath his feet. He remembered the pressure of Hai Xia’s fingers around his when he swallowed the fake death pill. He remembered Hai Xia’s words, “I’m a little tired,” just before the final knife plunged into his chest. Then he opened his eyes. The morning light of July 1916 fell across the knife on the wall, its handle tightly wrapped in blue-gray cloth. Hai Xia stood leaning against the doorframe with two bowls of porridge, the old scar on his wrist not yet faded. He was still alive.

He decided to play a new game of chess. He would uproot Mo Yungao and stop the Dusk Grass at the docks. He kept every truth from more than a decade in the future to himself. He had planned every move, making each one in advance.

But Zhang Haixia saw through him in just one morning: the odd speed at which he checked the cargo, the knots he tied in his knife tassel when nervous, and the fact that someone had died in his dreams.

“Does your game have room for a deputy who can tell how many knots you’ve tied?”

Zhang Haiyan thought he was protecting him. He didn’t know that the person he was protecting had been dismantling his game since the very first glance.