by JY Yang
Yongcheow exhaled. “Not just that. People make mistakes, they can’t be mistakes. And I don’t think you believe that either.”
“Don’t I?”
“If you do, then a mistake saved my life. I’m still grateful.”
Akeha snorted. He held out a hand, and Yongcheow took it, pulling himself up.
The first day flowed over into the next. Their journey relaxed into easier banter. Akeha pressed Yongcheow on Machinist philosophy, a debate that rolled into a tangle of points and counterpoints.
“No,” Yongcheow said, exasperation creeping into his voice, “we’re not advocating the abolishment of everything that uses slackcraft. We just want to develop alternatives for laypeople.”
“But you’ll still need to rely on Tensors. As long as there are things that can only be done through slackcraft—”
“We’re not trying to abolish the Tensorate either! Of course there will still be things that work on slackcraft—”
“Lots of things.”
“Yes. Many. Like—”
“Talkers.”
“Aha.” Yongcheow brightened. “You’d be surprised. There’s been work done on this. Someone found a way to record sounds as electrical signals, which you can transmit instantly, or almost instantly, through wires.”
“Wires.”
“Yes. If you have devices connected by wires, you can talk.”
“So if I’m in Cinta Putri, and I have someone in Chengbee I want to talk to, I have to run a wire from Cinta Putri all the way to Chengbee. Six thousand li. Just so we can talk.”
Yongcheow sighed. “It—someone is working on it. It is only a start.”
The path eased and sloped gently downhill as they approached Waiyi. As the day proceeded, Akeha said, “The Machinist movement is admirable. I agree: non-Tensors should have access to technology that doesn’t rely on slackcraft. And there may be factions in the Tensorate who also agree. But the Protectorate will never relinquish its source of power. Your movement is doomed to misfortune.”
“Good thing I don’t believe in the fortunes, then.”
“You believe in the will of your Almighty. How is that different?”
“The Almighty decides our circumstances. He doesn’t decide our actions. It’s what He gave us free will for.”
“So you chose rebellion.”
“We chose to act. Rebellion was the Protectorate’s choice. They could easily have accepted our existence. But they didn’t.”
Akeha let this thought circulate, picking apart the reasons he felt uncomfortable whenever free will was brought up. Even though he knew the real answer.
At the next stop, he finally confessed, “It’s hard for me to believe in free will.”
They had set up in a shallow limestone cave, a slanted scar in the side of the mountain forming the eastern forest border. Yongcheow looked sideways at him. “Let me guess. Because of your sister?”
“No matter what we did, her visions happened anyway. Future events can be set in stone. Where is your free will in that?”
Yongcheow folded careful hands over his belly. “But in those cases, you did do something, didn’t you? You went to find the new Head Abbot. Your mother’s purging Machinists. Some things might be fixed, but everything around them can be changed. That’s the part that counts.”
“A test. That’s the Obedient belief, isn’t it? Everything is a test from the heavens.”
A considered silence simmered. Then Yongcheow spoke. “The saying goes, ‘The black tides of heaven direct the courses of human lives.’ To which a wise teacher said, ‘But as with all waters, one can swim against the tide.’”
His gaze was unshakeable as it fixed on Akeha. “I chose to swim. So can you.”
Chapter Sixteen
THEY WERE LESS THAN twenty li from Waiyi when the Protectorate caught up to them.
It was the snuffling that alerted Akeha. It came from the right, through a thicket of grass and shrubs, in the same tenor as a boar hunting for food. But there was no corresponding rustle, no crunch of massive porcine body through underbrush. Akeha squeezed Yongcheow’s arm to stop him walking.
Yongcheow frowned. Akeha put a finger to his lips and directed the man to the cover of a peony bush.
The snuffling intensified. Something stirred within the blades and leaves.
The feathered head of a raptor snapped up from the vegetation.
Akeha forced his breathing to stay even. The creature’s sleek head swiveled. It blinked.
He knew that ash coloring, the lichens of dark blue spread over the top of the head. A lifetime ago, there had been hatchlings in the Grand Monastery. In the mornings Akeha and Mokoya would throw wet slivers of meat to the waiting scramble of teeth.
It was said raptors had memories as long as their claws were sharp. “Tempeh,” he whispered. “It’s me. Akeha.”
The raptor’s nostrils flared.
A scout. The Protectorate had sent pugilists after Yongcheow. A betrayal on Thennjay’s part? Hard to tell. He had no way of knowing Akeha was involved.
Tempeh pushed through the vegetation. An electric collar, hard and silver, sat in a wide band across its throat. Akeha frowned. The Grand Monastery’s raptors didn’t need to be controlled with shock collars—
Unless—
A targeted jolt through water-nature broke the clasp. As the collar clattered to the ground, it revealed a ribbon of scarred flesh, down and feathers burned off.
The raptor hissed, circling, surprised.
“It’s over,” Akeha said softly. “You don’t have to—”
That thought was shattered by the high, rotating sound of a lightcraft. Too late. Akeha’s senses sharpened in the Slack. A fully trained pugilist would have the advantage over him. Speed was his only chance. A knife to the throat before they could act—
The lightcraft crested over the brush, bearing a familiar figure. Master Yeo, the old disciplinarian from the monastery, clad in the sharp lines of Protectorate knit.
“Akeha.” Her smile was a razor.
Half a second’s delay. That’s all it took. His knife sailed, but it was too late. Master Yeo didn’t blink. Her cudgel moved: one end struck the knife into vegetation. The other end swung around, and an electrical bolt pierced Akeha.
He folded like a fan, veins on fire. But soon as he touched ground, he was struggling back up, fighting for clarity, sending a clumsy shockwave in her direction—
She whipped water-nature around his neck. Akeha gasped as it cut off blood and air. She would crush his vertebrae if she could. He pushed back in water-nature, tried to knock her down with another shockwave, but she resisted easily.
Spasming black bloomed in his vision. He fell to his knees, fighting for consciousness. She was too fast, too strong, too experienced. As his limbs collapsed under him, he sent a last, desperate tendril to Tempeh, trying to spur the raptor into action. Trying to override its fear and confusion.
Nothing. The black closed over him. Instinct drove his fingers to clutch uselessly at his throat. As he sank, all he saw was bright colors, flashes from childhood.
A loud, sharp crack filled the air.
The pressure released in an instant. Air flooded his lungs. A heartbeat’s delay juddered by before he returned to his body, forcing it upright. His head sang with blood reasserting itself.
He felt Yongcheow before he saw the man. Warm hands grasped his arms as his eyes fought to focus. “Akeha? Are you all right? Please, say something.”
He smelled the sulfur on him and understood.
Yongcheow’s fingers pressed into his face. “Akeha.”
He found words: “Where is she?”
Yongcheow glanced over his shoulder. Akeha struggled to numb feet, leaning on the other man, who winced. Akeha brushed a reassuring hand over the man’s still-healing wound before staggering forward.
Master Yeo lay where she had fallen, but she was still alive. Blood patterned her face, fresh runnels crawling from her nose and mouth. The gun
shot had punctured her chest, where an ocean of red was spreading. Her eyes turned toward Akeha as he crouched.
“Who sent you?” he asked. “Who did you come for?”
Her lips moved. Thick bubbles emerged, crimson mixed with frothy pink.
Tell me, he sent through the Slack. The twins’ old trick sometimes worked with other people. But he felt nothing except her rage and confusion. And pain.
Akeha sighed and shut his eyes. He reached for water-nature, broad and shining, and snapped her spine cleanly across the base of her neck.
He stood up. “Protectorate uniform and rank. She defected from the monastery.”
Yongcheow was trembling beside him.
“Are you all right?”
Yongcheow said nothing, head moving, jaw working, staring at the body on the ground.
Akeha gripped his arm. “Yongcheow.”
“It happened so fast,” he whispered. “I had no time to think.” He had the bright, trembling eyes of someone witnessing death for the first time.
“You did what was necessary,” Akeha said.
Yongcheow didn’t respond. Akeha looked back down. A dead body at their feet. One in a long trail that had no beginning and probably no end. “Mother wouldn’t have just sent regular troops to cut down Tensors in the purge. She’d send pugilists, like her. This woman had blood on her hands. I guarantee it.”
Finally, slowly, Yongcheow nodded.
The raptor slunk in. Its narrow snout quested over the body, curious nostrils flaring, lips peeling back at the smell of fresh meat. Akeha hissed sharply and it backed away, rustling its feathers in submission. It still remembered the monastery. Still remembered him.
“There are no righteous deaths,” Yongcheow whispered. “Only ones that cannot be avoided.”
Akeha recognized the edict he was quoting from. He had learned it, too, early in his career. It brought less and less comfort as the years went by.
“We need to bury her,” Akeha said. “We can do that, at least.”
Chapter Seventeen
“HOW DO I KNOW I can trust you?”
Lady Han’s remaining eye, the one not curtained behind an embroidered patch, speared Akeha like an insect. The leader of the Machinists wore an eastern suit of jacket and pants, its sun-red fabric the brightest splash in a cavern cut out of raw granite. Between them, Yongcheow’s scrolls lay isolated on a silver tray.
“I came of my own will,” Akeha said.
“But for what purpose? The Protector’s son, showing up at this precise point in time . . . it’s a bit convenient, isn’t it?”
She’d had her subordinates seize him when they arrived at the hideout, almost spent from the long, steep journey from Waiyi to the caves. Yongcheow, sweat-glazed, had to stammer that he was a comrade, not a prisoner.
The other man was a reassuring weight in the periphery. “Perhaps it is the will of the Almighty,” Akeha said.
“I have less tolerance for jokes than you think.” She leaned on the table separating them.
Akeha had some memories of Lady Han, a cloud of impressions blurred by the stretch of intervening years. She had been close to Mother once, a beloved concubine, perhaps more. Akeha had been a child then; by the time he returned to the Great High Palace years later, she was gone. The missing eye was new.
He lifted his hands, blank palms out. “It was not a joke. I have no other explanation for you.”
Her eye narrowed suspiciously.
“I have fled the consequences of my mother’s rule for ten years. I was happy to live that way, in ignorance, as long as it didn’t affect me. But this week, something changed.” He shot a quick look at Yongcheow. “What else would you call it? Coincidence? It feels like more than that.”
“The accidental rebel? The heaven-sent rebel? Neither sounds plausible to me.”
He shrugged. What else could he offer?
Her guards shifted around them. Surrounded. He knew that he would walk away from this meeting a member of the movement, or not at all.
“All right,” said Lady Han. “Prove it.” She swept from the table, paced a small circle, and turned back to Akeha. “I have a task for you.”
“Name it.”
“Return to the Protectorate and kill the prophet.”
It took two heartbeats to confirm he hadn’t misheard. His skin cooled. “What?”
“She’s your sister, isn’t she? You can get close enough. Surprise her. She won’t expect it.”
Akeha’s tongue stumbled over syllables. “She has nothing to do with—”
“She’s a prophet,” Lady Han said. “She sees things no one should know.” A damning finger pointed to the scroll. “One prophecy, and over two hundred people dead or vanished. It has to stop.”
“She has no control over what she sees,” Akeha hissed.
“Exactly. The only way to stop her is to kill her. It sounds harsh, but it’s true. Kill her, and your mother gets no more insights into our plans.”
Akeha’s chest crumpled like parchment fed to a flame. “You would see her killed for this?”
Yongcheow could not hold his tongue. “She’s done nothing! If we’re going to murder innocents, how are we any better than the Protectorate?”
Lady Han’s head snapped in his direction. “Silence. We don’t kill lightly.” She turned back to Akeha. “One life could save countless others.”
“You don’t know that,” Yongcheow said. “This is indefensible.”
“If you want an assassin, find someone else,” Akeha said through clenched teeth. “If this is the price for joining your movement, I choose death.”
She stalked toward him. Akeha snapped into fighting mode, crisp in the Slack, even as his thoughts jumped in electric lines: Mokoya must be warned. He might die, but Yongcheow had the gun. He could strike, inflict maximum damage, give Yongcheow the chance to—
Lady Han stood before him. A diminutive woman with the force of a thunderstorm. His mind capsized, thoughts of resistance and murder scattering like spilled beans. She surveyed the riot of emotion snared upon his face. A smile blossomed across hers.
“A man of morals,” she said. “Not what I expected of a smuggler.”
He let her words and meaning sink through him. “You asked me to murder my own sister,” he said, enunciating every syllable sharply.
“You come from a bloodline stained with remorseless familicides. I had to make sure of what you are.”
A muscle seized in his jaw. He had little patience for those who used his sister’s life as a plaything, a bargaining chip. He said, “If you wanted my loyalty, there were better ways of earning it.”
She laughed and thumbed his chin, as though she considered herself a kindly aunt. “Don’t think I’ll go easy on you,” she said, the corners of her eyes crinkling. “I will watch you very carefully, Sanao Akeha.”
He breathed out as his heart rate rappelled down to normal. But his hands remained clenched in knuckled determination. “And I will do the same.”
* * *
Their safe house in Waiyi was a gap-toothed cottage, cushioned by dirt rows once home to broad beans and pumpkins, now a forest of weeds. The sun had fallen. Yongcheow’s gait remained stiff as they walked the stony, serpentine path toward its silhouette. One of Lady Han’s guards had been a doctor, and his wounds had been made whole, but the pain lingered, as pain usually did.
“I’ve never met her,” he admitted. “Lady Han. I’d heard her described as remarkable, but . . .”
“There must have been a reason Mother liked her,” Akeha said. The fist of emotions in his chest had yet to ease open. The swift calculation he’d seen in Lady Han had left quite an impression. “And it would take more than courage to stand against the Protector.”
“What do you think she would have done if you’d agreed?”
“I don’t know.” Unlikely that she would have grieved Mokoya’s death.
Beside them, Tempeh snuffled in the tangled grass. The raptor had determinedly followed
them into Waiyi, and Akeha had given up on chasing it away. Freed from the painful confines of Protectorate control, the creature had decided what it wanted.
“What you said to Lady Han. About the will of the Almighty. Did you mean that?”
The warm, damp evening air was a blessing. “It felt like the right thing to say.”
Yongcheow hesitated. “I don’t know how else to put it, but . . . look. To be Obedient is to live with constant ridicule. People call you superstitious, uneducated, backward. Behind your back and to your face. I don’t care what you believe, but don’t say those things just to make fun of them.”
“I wasn’t.” Akeha looked at his feet. “The past few days . . . I don’t know how to explain them. I—” He sucked in another gift of air. “I have a lot to think about.”
Tempeh ran ahead of them toward the house. Five yields away, it stopped, head alert, feathers erect along its spine. Akeha stopped Yongcheow.
“What is it?” he whispered.
Akeha gestured for silence. Within the house the Slack hung in a way that sent a frisson through him. A familiar presence waited.
Tempeh stood by the door and rumbled.
His heart a burr in his chest, Akeha pushed the door open.
At the dining table a figure, robe-clad, stood and pulled its gray hood back. Her eyes fixed on his, shining. “Keha.”
Mokoya.
She looked exactly the same. She looked entirely different. The years had changed her face, but she was still his sister, his twin. The same cheekbones, the same hooded eyes, the same crooked mouth. She had not painted her face. She was still dressed as a nun. And her hair clung to her scalp like a penitent’s or mourner’s.
“So it’s true,” she said. “You’ve joined the Machinists.”
He stepped into the house, Yongcheow behind him. The door clicked shut. His lips, out of practice, struggled to form her name. What came out instead was “What are you doing here?”
She stepped toward him, hands held up to touch his face. “Keha.”
His chest was full; his heart was empty. “How did you find me?”
“I saw you.”
He broke away from her, turning so she couldn’t see the expression on his face. “You dreamed this?”