Face-Slapping12 min read
"I Tossed Them Bread — Then I Threw the City Into Fire"
ButterPicks17 views
"I'll toss one more," I said, and I did.
"Please, sir, anything," came the rasping chorus from below the second-story window.
I lifted the loaf like it was nothing and watched the crowd turn, dull eyes bright for a second. Jennifer had already started: the cloth bag, the pieces of dried meat, the white buns tossed like coins. Colin and Aaron stood at the cart, heavy and fast, moving what we needed to move.
"Give us your best face," I told the crowd and winked.
"Don't hurt—" someone tried.
"Get it yourself!" Colin barked. He loved the noise.
They climbed; they fought. They chewed through wrists and palms for a crust. I loved the way hunger made people honest and ugly. I loved the way a single slice of meat could make a man bare his teeth at his neighbor.
"Stop," I called, because a crowd needs a voice. "One for each. No killing."
"Please, miss! Please!" Jennifer was small and loud. She always was.
I threw the meat.
One scrap landed among hands and elbows. It was like turning on a light. The crowd lunged.
"Hold!" I laughed. "Go, go—run toward the east gate. Rumor says the rebels will come. Run now while you can."
It sounded like a game. It worked like a match.
"Grab your bundles! Go!" I shouted. "Don't let anyone take your bread!"
They scattered. Many did. Most didn't.
A man shoved forward, grabbed a bun, and another man grabbed him. Fingers went into eyes. Women screamed. Someone pulled a child's shawl.
"Don't you dare take from my—" a voice cut a throat. The sound of it climbed up to the window and froze me.
"Throw!" I said to Jennifer.
She hit the window and the next thing I saw was a head tumbling in a red smear onto the city gate.
"That's Li, the governor," Aaron whispered.
Colin whistled. "Well. That will make the papers."
"Perfect," I said.
"Your head's nailed to the gate," Jennifer breathed.
We were supposed to be leaving Hanzhou. We had a box to deliver, money promised, a man to move. We had our code: take the pay, keep the goods, and move on. We were not supposed to make history.
"Chief—" Colin nudged my shoulder. "We have to move. Now."
"Yeah," I said. "We move."
We rode like men with debts on their backs, like thieves who owned the road. At the east gate the guards were scrambling. Men were running out of the city in a tide. The governor's head on the gate changed everything. Panic is a clever ally.
"We're not carrying dead weight," I told the crate.
The crate had something inside that was supposed to be dead.
It wasn't.
He was thin as a held-in breath when Colin and Aaron pried the lid. He blinked once and every breath in the cart stopped.
"He's not supposed to be awake," Aaron muttered.
"I sold him as number nine-eight-five," I said. "He's cargo, not conversation."
"Nine-eight-five?" he croaked, voice brittle. He was younger than I expected. He had a wit-bent jaw and a sword scar that made his face look like a promise. His hair was tied up with red thread. He tried to smile.
"Can you ride?" I asked.
"No," he said.
"Then you will learn." I lifted him up. "You will ride, or you'll die here."
He swallowed. He tried to protest; his back flared with pain. Yet his eyes were sharp.
"Name?" I asked as we pushed the crate back closed.
"Elias," he said.
I kept him between us like a prize. We chased the horizon across river and marsh, across miles that might have been weeks. We reached the ship at night. We bought three decks, cabin after cabin. For a price, men can look away.
"Chief!" Jennifer hissed when we set him to rest. "He's breathing funny."
"He's alive. Good," I said and let myself smile.
We had a buyer. We had a line of knives outside the hull of our boat. We had men in the dark who wanted the cargo alive and cheap.
"Talk business," I told them.
"Two times the price," a head behind a mask said.
I showed a short, sweet grin. "We sell lives. We sell them once."
They smirked. Lanterns bobbed on the water like eyes. Arrows dipped in oil glinted black.
"I want his life," the man said. "We take him for twice."
"I want the ledger," I answered. "I want his body and the contract. Coins speak louder."
They named numbers. I named numbers back.
"Five thousand," I concluded. "Five thousand for his life and the ledger. Cash in hand."
They spat.
"Robbery, then?" the leader asked.
"Robbery," I agreed. "But I take the risks. I have a crew who knows how to die for pay."
They drew their bows. Twenty bolts they let loose. We were outnumbered. We were not outmanned. We, Dark Scent, had a way.
The deck erupted: Colin's chain-hammer broke men like rotten boards. Aaron's knife was a small storm. Jennifer's whip cracked like a judgment. I pulled a slender blade and moved through the shadow like a breath through paper.
When the leader came forward to test me, I put my knife in Elias's ribs. It was small work. He went still and slicked red.
"Dead?" the man asked.
"Dead," I said.
They frowned. "You sell dead goods."
"If you want live goods, you will pay for live goods," I said.
They paid.
They took their coins and left the river to carry a few bodies home. We watched them burn.
"You didn't have to—" Elias croaked when I came back. He tasted of iron and river mud.
"I had to," I said. "We do not take half-sins. We take full debts. We sell certainty."
He stared at me, hurt maps on his skin. "Why did you—"
"Because it's what we do," I answered. "Because what you are to others is now ours, and we keep our covenants."
He looked at me like a man seeing a blade and wanting to believe it wouldn't cut him.
"I thought you were dead," he said.
"Maybe you were," I replied. "But people move even when they're not supposed to."
We reached the capital a month later, not by choice but by design. The city was full of gold smoke and polite violence. I wore a grin on my face and a coffin behind me.
"Are you planning a funeral?" Elias asked when we reached the gate.
"Always," I said. "A good exit requires flourish."
We brought the "dead" man to a buyer. We laid him down in a crimson casket with brass nails and watched the buyer's reticence turn to greed. He wanted a corpse, he wanted a story, he wanted to hide his own raw scent. He offered the final coin, and in the end, his hands shook like he's never known coin could make anyone brave.
But the capital is an animal with teeth. Someone else had teeth.
We sold him once; a band of killers tried to buy our silence again. They offered more. We wanted to refuse. They threatened. I decided to let them taste our truth.
I slit Elias's chest, and we handed the body over as proof of death.
"Stop!" one of the killers hissed as he knelt and shoved his fingers to the dead man's throat.
"He's dead," the leader said. He tasted the blood like a bad joke.
But then a note arrived at our place.
"Bring the living. Five times. Or we will show you to the city."
They wanted more.
We smirked and accepted. People who hunt us always die. We extorted, we traded; law is a thing you can swallow for a price.
We moved into a garden I had my eye on since before the head on the gate. A square of jade in a city of smoke. The house had peacocks and lacquered tables and an owner who cared more about appearances than anything else.
"Nice," Jennifer said, sticking a finger in the rotunda.
"We'll keep the rotunda," I said. "And everything else."
It was mine from the moment I said it.
But days after our arrival, the city started burning in other places.
"Who is dead?" I asked when Aaron came back with a dangling face.
"Wu—" he clicked his tongue. "Wu's dead. Teeth vendor. Burned."
"Wu the tooth-woman? She ran our local accounts."
"Burned to the ground. Her shop's a ruin. She didn't come back."
"Strange," I said.
People die in cities all the time. The word "strange" is just the first brick of a plan.
We started asking questions. The ledger we sold—the chain of hands the coin had passed through—was longer than anyone expected. Luo at the pawn shop said ten men had touched it. People at the docks said someone high up had sniffed around. An official named Dale Guo was using the case to make his own fortune.
"Go to the magistrate?" Colin asked.
"Watch," I said.
At the teeth shop they had found a trail: a carriage seen, a man with purple silk, a young woman in the wrong street at the wrong time. We found a whisper of a name: "Logan." We found a doorway that led into a rich back. We found a girl called Autumn—thin, scared.
"Where is she?" I asked. "Bring her."
We took the guilty into our hands before the law decided who to crown.
In the middle of night we took the gate and broke into the mansion of a man called Logan Jordan.
"Who are you?" he demanded as we split his guards like rotten rope.
"Your conscience," I said, and yanked down his trousers.
He squawked.
"You killed Wu for refusing," I said. "You will tell me the man who hired you."
He named a name from a voice in the dark. He mumbled something about the magistrate and a prince and old debts. It all smelled of money and of convenient scapegoats.
"Tell the truth," I said.
He didn't. So I made him eat his truth.
"White-cooked fish," I told Colin.
"I don't cook," Colin said.
"Then haul water," I said. "I will give you a demonstration."
We put Logan in a pot of hot water and unstitched him piece by piece where he had been cruel to others. I let him burn, not in fire but with cold, slow punishments: the city would see him; the city would know.
We took him to the magistrate's hall.
"Bring in the bastard!" I shouted.
He was carried in like a ragdoll. The magistrate and his staff watched as I walked in, paint on my lips, dust on my boots.
"Who hired you?" I asked.
Logan's eyes were wide with the kind of fear men get when they finally meet their shadow. "It was—"
"You'll tell the court?" someone asked. The judge wrote notes with a hand that shook.
Logan screamed. He confessed. He named names: the magistrate's cousin, a lord who wanted a scandal buried, and a spy for a prince named Julian Guzman.
"Julian?" Elias said. His voice was a paper peel. He had been listening from the seat at my back.
"Yes," I said. "Julian Guzman is not the only rat, but he is a rat with claws."
Logan fell apart and cried for mercy. He slumped into dirt; the crowd gathered and stooped near him like vultures.
The magistrate pretended to be surprised. "This man will be punished," he said. "We will investigate."
That night the city was no longer as polite. People were recording with lenses, whispering and pointing. Logbooks were burned. Men who thought themselves untouchable discovered there were more ways to be touched.
You want face-slapping? I gave them the whole rack.
Julian's house was emptied. His silk was burned. His name was shouted in market squares. His friends left him like rats on a sinking ship. The river carried his goods like a rusty promise.
"Julian will never be whole again," Jennifer said.
"Good," I said.
Dale Guo lost his post. He had tried to frame us, had tried to play both sides. He was stripped of title, then of honor. He begged in the city gate, voice useless. People spat; some filmed. He knelt and we watched while merchants took his goods. The cameras in court—men's eyes—took pictures. He lost the office, the money fled, and his name closed like a shutter.
As for the man who hired the first killers, Julian, he lost his marriage the day his house burned. His wife left in the middle of the night with a chest that was his only proof of anything human. His name became a taunt.
The city loved it.
"Is this enough?" Elias asked after one magistrate had his knees bloodied by men he'd wronged.
"No," I said. "This is the beginning."
You don't break a city with a single match. You make it burn because it was already lit. You make people who thought themselves clean smell what they are made of.
We dug into the ledger until dust came up from the pages and the names began to make a map. Big men with soft hands and ugly taste, men who could wreck an army by sending a rumor, men who could poison a kitchen to silence a camp—these names were in ink. They were blood-money that washed through our hands for years.
"Who else?" Elias asked.
"Everyone," I said.
"You want to bring down princes?" he whispered.
"I want to break the men who hurt women and the men who pretend not to," I said. "If princes stand in the way, princes will find themselves naked."
Elias looked at me like a man who had found a knife in a purse. He had been a soldier in another life. He had a title here: a prince with both enemies and friends. He had been wounded and left, and we had dragged him in like a piece of a play that someone else had written.
"Why did you not sell me?" he asked one night. "You could have made more."
"Because you were a better wager alive," I said.
He laughed in a way that sounded like a knife edge.
I took the heat and turned it.
We went to trial. We fed the court the names. We handed over confessions. We brought witnesses: the people the powerful used and then dropped. We dragged an entire net of rats into the sunlight, and the sunlight was a hungry thing.
The magistrate had his own reasons. He wanted a spectacle. He wanted to show he could cleanse the city. So we played his show.
In the public square we brought those men out. I let them kneel. I let the magistrate ask them if they had things to confess. They lied for a long time.
When they fell to confessing, they did so louder each time.
"Burn his ledger!" I ordered.
They did not have ledgers. They had been smart.
"Where is the evidence?" everyone asked.
I had it. A piece at a time, collated in a thin book that smelled of dust and rust. It was the map of their crimes. When the magistrate opened it, the names were there like scars.
"Where are your friends now?" I asked a man who had crushed a family for coin.
"They are gone," he said.
"Then you die doubly dead. People will know you were cowardly. People will spit."
He fell apart then. He knelt and began to cry and ask for his lover back, who had left him before we took the stage.
"Call them," I said.
They called for the wives, the sons, the men they'd ruined to stand and tell their stories. The crowd boiled. This was the part people came to see.
There, on the magistrate's steps, men fell to their knees and cried for mercy. A thousand voices sang the act and recorded it. A thousand palms slapped the air as they were thrown from balconies, and those with eyes watched while others recorded.
"Take off his robe," I told the magistrate.
They tore him down to his linen. He shriveled under the lights like a bug in the sun.
"Strip him of everything," I said. "Take his goods and give them to those he broke."
People laughed. People filmed. People cheered.
"Now," I said, "if you do anything that tries to dress this up, we will come back with more names."
They saw the crowd close around them like a net.
Dale Guo's house was stripped. Papers were set on fire in front of him. He was paraded through Market Lane as people threw stones. His servants turned their backs. He knelt and begged beneath a sign that said "You Are What You Steal." He drooled apologies until the sun went down.
Julian's son was told by the boys at the school that his father was a thief. His name would not be spoken without a laugh in the years ahead.
A governor who had been arrogant found himself stripped of his office and marched into the cold, his head uncovered. He knelt in the rain. People spat. They filmed. The record changed him.
Elias watched. He stood next to me when the market cheered. He took a hand and then stepped back.
"Why are you here?" he asked one night, in the quiet after the last trial.
"I live in the corners people forget," I said. "I pay coin for justice when the city sells it. I protect what belongs to me. I am not clean. I am not kind. I am not a hero."
"You are not just a seller," he said softly. "You build a kingdom."
"Not yet," I answered.
In the end we took what the law would not give us. Those men lost their names and their doors. Their friends walked away like they had never existed. They couldn't get their money back. They couldn't get their jobs back. They lost houses, titles, and wives. They hung in the public eye like bad fruit.
The final scene is not a punishment for one man alone.
We found the vine that tied together the magistrate, the spy, and the man who started the debt. We pulled it. It was rotten. A list of names unspooled. We took that list to the great hall and left it open like a wound.
"Who will answer?" I asked.
They answered by dropping like flies.
Public shaming was the new execution. They crawled, they begged, they were stripped and made to sing their crimes. They were bankrupted. The wives left. The businesses left. Their children were told to stop speaking their names.
The crowds did not stop.
When the last shout settled and the city learned to breathe again, I sat on the coffin-lid that had been my bed when we came. Elias stood at my shoulder, watching the river cut the city in two.
"Will it last?" he asked.
"No," I said. "It never does."
"Then why?"
"Because people need to remember what happens when they cross us," I said. "Because someone must stitch the world when the big hands unpick it. Because my crew needs a home and so do I."
"Will you stay?" he asked.
"Maybe," I said. "If you stop looking like an enemy all the time."
He laughed.
That night, I put my head on that coffin-lid and thought of the first loaf I sent down. Hunger had made men honest; hunger had made them cruel. So had power.
The ledger was burned. The names were spoken. The city rearranged itself around the new truth.
I closed my eyes.
A peacock cried in the courtyard. Someone lit a cheap firework. The sound was small and sharp in the dark.
I promised nothing.
I promised only that if men tried to use others for meat again, we would find them, and we would make sure everyone could see what we did to them.
"You're not a saint," Elias said into my hair.
"I'm not a tyrant either," I said.
He didn't need a name for me. He had learned my rules.
I had taken a city and set it to rights in the only way I knew — by slapping faces open and making sure the bad tasted their own blood.
The coffin creaked under me.
"Don't get comfortable," I told the dark.
The city had been cleansed a little. I had my garden. I had my crew. I had my bargains and my bargains had faces.
"Tomorrow," I said, "we go to where the next ledger points."
"Always," Elias said.
We laughed because laughing is how people survive.
I stood up, dusted the coffin-lid, and stepped toward the garden gate. The peacock spread its feathers and watched. The city watched back.
I took one coin from my pocket and left it on the coffin where it had rested on the day we bought it.
"Pay for your own good night," I said.
Elias rolled his eyes, and for the first time since he woke in my cart he smiled without a scar in it.
We walked out into a new morning where men would whisper our names and remember to lock their doors.
And for once, I let them.
The End
— Thank you for reading —