Chapter 1: Alive, Inconveniently

Mu Qian had a list of people who wanted her dead — she had been maintaining it since age nineteen and it currently had eleven names on it. She did not yet know which of them had finally acted, but she intended to find out, which required her to first stop bleeding on the floor of an abandoned relay station and second to accept that the man kneeling beside her with a physician's kit was not, as she had initially assumed, there to finish the job. "Stop moving," he said, in the accented Mandarin of the northern kingdoms. "You are making it worse." She stopped moving. She did not lower her hand from the knife at her belt.