The Yao Dynasty has a tax called the beauty tax. A woman's looks determine her rank, and she must pay silver every month. The lowest rank costs five taels, and the next-lowest costs three, just enough to take an entire month's wages from a weaver who works without sleep.
Fifteen-year-old Shen Zhao is in the next-lowest rank. To cover the five-tael tax, her mother hanged herself with a strip of white silk. Her father spent years secretly investigating the tax, keeping an old ledger full of corruption and resolving to expose it. But on the morning he went to submit his petition, he collapsed in front of the tax office.
Before he died, he left her an old abacus. Hidden in the bead's core was a line of words: the Gu salt merchants, the Left Chancellor's cut, the empress's final edict.
A single verdict sends Shen Zhao to the Weaving Tax Crimes Camp. Nobody thinks she'll make it out alive. But on her first day in the camp, she publicly points out that the rations for seventeen people have vanished without a trace.
They all say that in the camp for condemned women, those who calculate correctly don't live long. But Shen Zhao says, “Right and wrong can be covered up. The accounts cannot.”
As long as the books remain, the truth will never die.
