Free The Red Heart of Jade by Marjorie M. Liu

thought, one day in the far future, another woman would likely rest in another bed, also thinking about the past, with some enigmatic clue in her hand, dreaming questions, wondering. Maybe she would feel her own body weighed down with the monumental task of uncovering half-truths, conjecture, poor shadows of a past holding true meaning and significance only to the dead.
    Nothing lasts forever , Miri reminded herself. All this around you, already dead. You, Owen, gone. Ni-Ni and Dean and everyone you love, dead to nothing, except to you. Only to you .
    Miri closed her eyes. She did not want to think about mortality. Flesh was worthless. It was the mind that mattered. All those thoughts and dreams, every little hurt and triumph, the trivialities and epics of a single life, fading into nothing. Human hearts left no records.
    Maybe the jade was a record, a book of a heart. It was there, ready to be read, perhaps in the afterlife, perhaps by those left behind.
    A nice thought. Miri preferred it to the self-mutilating idolatry of mysterious gods—enjoyed the poetry, the idea of some woman, millennia dead, realizing the significance of her life and taking immortality into her own hands, into her body, replacing jade with bone.
    Miri touched her chest, imagining once again stone instead of flesh. Warm and red. She traced the lines in her mind, feeling them on her fingertips. She tasted them on her tongue, heavier than air, sweet and close as song. In her heart, familiar as English, Chinese; a dead language resurrected. It did not make sense, but Miri was suddenly too tired to care. Overwhelmingly weary, with weight bearing on her body and mind. Holding her down with sleep.
    Butterflies , she thought, drifting. Open your mouth and let them out .
    She almost did, almost said the words floating on her tongue—because this was dreamtime, fantasy, all reason cast to wayside—but at the last moment her body jerked, flung down hard with the sensation of falling, and she snapped out of the hazy daze. Awake, awake. The sensation, the knowing in her mouth, disappeared. Butterflies, scattered.
    Miri touched her lips. She remembered something alive, beating fierce inside her mouth. Ghost words.
    Or just ghosts.
    She sat up, uneasy, and forced herself from the bed. Standing was a mistake; she swayed, putting a hand to her head as pain struck; an ice pick through her temple. She was light-headed, too. Miri closed her eyes, but the sensation did not pass. She walked to the bathroom, stumbling as her bare feet hit the cold marble. The world spun; she steadied herself against the counter, fighting to stay upright, glancing at herself in the mirror. No treat, there—not with the hard set of her mouth, the crease between her eyes that refused to disappear. A low ache spread through her muscles, accompanied by a prickled flush, like the onset of fever. The crease deepened.
    Miri stripped off her clothes and stepped into the shower. She did not wait for the water to warm, but turned it on, full-blast and cold. It felt good. She did not shiver. Her skin ate up the water, the unrelenting bitterness; she felt like she was on fire. Her heart hurt, too, the skin over her left breast tender to touch. She tried to ignore the burning, but the heat was too much. She could not breathe. She could not breathe enough to fill her lungs, and it was too much, too crazy. She never got sick. Never, and not like this. This was too fast.
    She shut down the water and fled naked and dizzy from the bathroom. Cool air hit her wet skin; she collapsed on the bed, drawing her knees to her chest, fighting to slow her hammering heart. She wanted to vomit, she wanted to scream, she wanted to disappear into the covers like a ghost and never feel again—to give up the flesh, the body, this inexplicable misery with her skin hot to the touch, burning and burning. Darkness flickered in her vision. Shutting her eyes only made it worse; she wondered if she was dying. Wondered, too, why