by JY Yang
“A week ago.”
A week ago. A black snake of fear coiled. He looked at her and saw that under her cloak, she still wore the box that collected her visions, her dreams. Everything she prophesied, the Tensorate collected and studied. A week ago. A torrent of words broke through: “What else did you see? What else do they know?”
“Who?” She followed his line of sight. “Keha—no. No! I destroyed that vision. You can do that, you know. I don’t hand everything over to Mother. If she’d hurt you, I—” She couldn’t complete the thought.
Akeha tightened his lips. Mokoya gave the impression she was made of glass, bright and clear and brilliant, and one blow away from shattering. She did not need to know about the grave they’d left in the forest.
“Your friends are safe,” she said. “I wouldn’t betray them to Mother.”
The snake within him struck. “But you let her have the one with the attack on the palace. The one that started the purges.”
He saw the shudder that went through her. “I had to! I had to. They were carrying explosives, Keha. Hundreds would have died, many of them innocents, if I’d done nothing. How could I have predicted what she would do with it?”
“She’s Mother. What did you think she would do with it? Pardon everyone involved? Say oh, it’s nothing, there’s nothing to worry about?”
“Keha, I—”
“No, she’s right.” Yongcheow’s interruption was fueled by a core of panic. “Unwarranted as it is, your mother’s retaliation would have been worse if they’d succeeded. If they’d blown up a whole section of the Great High Palace, she’d have had people executed in the street.”
Mokoya swallowed audibly. Memories crashed to the surface: his sister as a child, shaking and weeping in dark beds after a vision ripped through her. She’d done nothing to deserve this.
Twelve years apart, and the first thing he did was upset her. Where were the tender words he had imagined would burst forth when they saw each other again, older and wiser and settled in their places in the world? “Moko.” He brushed his palm against her cheek. She flinched, and something in him broke, but then she leaned into his touch. He waited until he could speak without shaking. “Why are you here?”
She took his hand, grasped it between hers. “I want you to come home.”
He shook his head. “Moko, I—”
“I’m pregnant.”
He stopped, stunned. “What?”
A smile crept across the pale trench of her face. “The child won’t be along for months, but—Thennjay and I have been trying for a while, and finally—”
“Congratulations,” he said, softly, in wonder.
“Come back,” she said, pressing into his hand. “Come back to the monastery. Thennjay can give you asylum. You’ll be safe. Mother can’t do anything. Please, Keha.” Her voice cracked, equal parts hope and sorrow. “Come home. I don’t want to raise a child who’s never met you.”
Akeha’s hand shook in hers. He imagined her child listening to their mother’s stories, trying to conjure up an uncle they knew only through words. His resolve softened, began to melt. It was tempting, so tempting, to say yes, to be forgiven, to return, to shape a glorious, shining future—
He turned away, terrified. There was Yongcheow, in a corner, struggling to keep his expression neutral. No matter what Akeha chose, he would still be here. He couldn’t return to the capital. And the spider-grasp of the Protectorate would continue to ensnare Machinists, out here and everywhere. That would still happen.
No. He turned to her. “I can’t.” Her mouth moved to register protests, and he said, “Moko, listen. You can’t stay here. It’s not safe. You have to go back.”
“Keha—”
“Go back home, Moko. You have a new family coming. Focus on your future. Forget about me.”
“Forget?”
He held her face in his hands. “What you and Thennjay are doing in the monastery—that’s important. Someone has to fight Mother from within. But that was never going to be me.”
Because he had always known, even as a child, that he was the lightning, while she was the fire in the core of planets. And the world needed both. Revolutions needed both. Someone had to wield the knives, but someone also had to write the treaties.
“My place is out here. You understand, don’t you?”
She trembled, as angry as she was devastated. “I’ve missed you so much.”
“I know.” And, great Slack, did he know. Deep in the pit of his belly, reaching up to suffocate him on the longest nights. He crushed her in a hug. “I know, Moko. I’ve missed you too.”
He let her cry herself empty on his shoulder. And later, when she had gone, as he crumpled against a solid surface struggling for sense and air, he let Yongcheow hold him, until he, too, was empty.
Much later, in the dark where they lay together in bed, skin to skin, Yongcheow asked, “Why didn’t you go with her?”
Akeha found Yongcheow’s hand and curled fingers against fingers. “Let the black tides of heaven direct our lives,” he murmured. He turned to look at his partner. “I choose to swim.”
Part Four
MOTHER
Chapter Eighteen
YEAR THIRTY-FIVE
WHEN THE SMOKE CLEARED, it left nothingness in its wake.
It wasn’t nothingness, exactly—there was debris and churned mud and a thick overcoat of sticky char. Lumps of organic ballast swelled from the ground, leaving the burnt landscape undulating like a graveyard. But as Akeha walked through the spongy ruin of the test site, he felt only nothingness around him. Nothingness clawed at his back and sides where the living trunks of linden trees had stood. Nothingness yawned in the cauterized air where there should have been the tang of nectar and sap and well-fed humus. Nothingness blanketed the muffled soil under his feet where once lay a thick layer of crisp autumn shedding.
The blast radius around him was a hundred yields wide. Akeha had stood on a nearby hill and shot the test device into the middle of the woods, a scallop of temperate wilderness just outside the port city of Bunshim. He’d made the weapon right, he thought, following the directives scribbled in the defector’s spindly hand. He’d performed the slackcraft as instructed, melting the gas within the tiny steel shell with so much fire- and earth-nature that it was no longer gas but something they had no name for. He’d held on to that seething, violent miasma for as long as his focus had allowed, letting go at the last possible moment, freeing the terrible energy that had accumulated within. The resulting shockwave—a balloon of gray shrouding bloodred—had knocked him off his feet from hundreds of yields away.
So this is what it does, he thought, walking through the carbonized aperture left behind. He’d known the device was a weapon, but he’d expected something like a big firecracker or a thunder bomb. Not this. The edges of the explosive wound harbored recognizable fragments—half-melted trees and charred mounds that had once been animals, felled not knowing what had hit them. But here, in the middle of the crater, the heat and light had been so intense that nothing was left except fine black ash. Everything had been pulverized at the moment of detonation.
The air felt wrong. Something lingered in it, worming through the Slack in glowing, infinitesimal paths. Coming down the hill toward the crater Akeha had put a barrier around himself, a protective layer of forest-nature just in case the blast had been toxic. That barrier was now under attack, being slowly clawed through by the changed air. As though the atoms of the dead things, too, had turned into ghosts that wanted to possess him. Wanted to drag him into dissolution with them.
The defector had come from one of the Tensorate’s secret divisions: sixteen Tensors playing on the radiant fringe of slackcrafting knowledge, manipulating the fine forces at the boundary of the five natures. One mad day the defector had killed her fifteen colleagues, burned the lab to the ground, and fled the capital city with the last copies of their manuscript. Standing in the middle of the blast grounds, feeling like death incarnate,
a destroyer of worlds, Akeha began to understand why.
This weapon needed a name. Akeha had another prototype swinging from his belt like a moon, and it begged for taxonomy that bayed of what it could do. He thought about fire and death and otherworldly annihilation. The word “jinn” drifted toward him. “Ifrit.” Perhaps.
Some time later Yongcheow found him kneeling before what remained of a deer, reciting a guilt-tinged prayer for its soul.
“So it works,” he said hesitantly, looking out over the ruined landscape. “You did it.”
Akeha unfolded himself. “Yes.”
“Congratulations?” The sentence came out half statement, half question; Yongcheow didn’t know what to make of the destruction either. He’d put up his own barrier, following Akeha’s example. Yongcheow scanned the lines of his lover’s face until confidence returned to him, then gently stroked his cheek. “I knew you could do it. I’m sure Lady Han will be delighted.”
Akeha, standing at the gates of Hell, said, “That’s what I’m afraid of.”
Yongcheow didn’t sigh, but the look on his face was grim. Akeha changed the topic. “I take it the exchange went well?”
“Yes. I’ve sent the merchant on his way.” Old habits made them speak in vague terms, even with nothing left alive to eavesdrop on them.
“Good.” He looked at the cloth parcel in Yongcheow’s other hand and frowned. “You brought dinner.”
A smile beamed through the gloom on Yongcheow’s face. “I cooked. It turned out surprisingly well. This time.”
The strangeness in the air chewed at him still. Akeha suppressed a shudder. “You shouldn’t have brought it here. Now it’s contaminated.” By what, he didn’t know. But just to be safe: “We’ll have to get rid of it.”
Yongcheow studied his expression and came to a grave understanding. He chuckled purposefully. “If you didn’t want to eat my cooking, you could have just said so.”
He emptied the containers over the poisoned ground. Soup noodles, the broth thick with nuts and spices, a recipe from his mother’s side of the family. Guilt flared through Akeha: it smelled good, especially by Yongcheow’s standards. He’d have to ask him to try again later. To make up for it.
* * *
They had vinegar noodles from a roadside stall back in Bunshim, perched on a bench next to the lively gullet of the city’s legendary perfumed quarter. Immersed in the warm glow of sunballs, the tart vapor of noodle broth, and the jabber of the drunk and the soon-to-be drunk, Akeha finally felt the unease quietly drain out of him, leaving him a normal person again.
The defector had killed herself not long after she’d passed her manuscripts to the Machinists. A washerwoman had gone up to her room in the safe house and found her curled into a stiff comma, a vial of poison spilled on the floor. Akeha had struggled to understand this—why flee, why spend agonizing weeks evading capture, if death had always been the final destination? If suicide had been the plan, why not perish in the flames with the rest of her division?
Now he understood. She had wanted the Machinists to know. Just in case she hadn’t been thorough enough. This was her insurance, her gamble against his mother’s ruthlessness. Her hope that both sides, understanding the horror of what had been wrought, would never resort to using these—what had he decided to call them again? These weapons.
“They’re too risky to be effective,” he said, partly to Yongcheow, partly to himself. “The slackcraft is too complex; most Tensors won’t have that much focus. If you do it wrong, you’ll destroy your own troops.”
“No doubt.” Yongcheow was thoughtful. “But you can do it.”
“I can. I’m not like most Tensors.”
“Isn’t it a good thing you’re on our side, then.”
They watched a dancer with a green ribbon in her hair flirting with a ship’s captain. “I nearly forgot,” Yongcheow said, in a tone meaning he hadn’t forgotten at all. “The merchant had something for you. A small surprise from the Grand Monastery.”
A flutter in his chest. “A letter?”
“Better than that.” Yongcheow reached into his sleeves and withdrew a cloth bundle the size of a plum. The same size as the yet-unnamed weapons. “It’s a gift. From your niece.”
“My niece.” Mokoya’s daughter. He unwrapped the bundle delicately.
Thick burlap peeled away to reveal a corkscrew of gleaming white petals, crudely shaped but recognizable as a lotus blossom. The grain of the ceramic whispered of shaping and firing by slackcraft. Akeha turned it around with vigilant fingertips, marveling at its construction.
Under the glass piece lay a note on lovingly crumpled gray paper. Unsteady brushstrokes read: To Uncle Akeha, from Eien.
Yongcheow watched him struggle to contain his expression and snorted. Akeha didn’t care, caught in the swell of warmth like a tidal wave. “Her slackcraft is improving,” he said.
“Well, with a mother like that, and her father the Head Abbot, I would be surprised if it didn’t.”
The glass lotus lay dwarfed by the palm of his hand, and he was seized by a sudden terror of dropping it. He had to find a safe place for it, somewhere padded and concealed. To Uncle Akeha, from Eien. With all the horrors in the world, it was easy to forget there were wonders too.
“Thank you,” he said to Yongcheow, even though his words were directed a thousand li away, at a smiling child he had never met and who had never met him.
* * *
They were threading toward sleep when Yongcheow ambushed him. “Have you ever thought about having children?”
Akeha froze. “What?” Remarkable that after the day’s happenings, the question still managed to unsettle him. His heart spun in his chest as he scrambled for an answer, a drowning man seeking dry land. “I don’t know. Why? Are you thinking about having children?”
“I asked you first.”
I’m the least fatherly person I know. “What would we do with a child on the run?”
“Mmh.”
Silence settled over the room. Akeha pushed up on one elbow, trying to read his partner’s face in the gloom. The clouded moonlight gave him nothing. The unspoken agreement was that neither of them was interested in parenthood. Or so he’d thought. “Yongcheow. Do you want children?”
“No. I was just curious. Just wondering.”
With Yongcheow there was no such thing as just wondering. “What’s wrong?” When the man didn’t answer, he pressed further: “What were you really asking?”
Yongcheow let the appropriate beats go by before firing the shot. “Why won’t you go back to Chengbee?”
Akeha sank onto the bed with a sigh. It always came down to this. Every year, every turning of the seasons, Yongcheow would ask him the same question, and he would give up the same excuses, the same nonanswers. When would he tire of this back-and-forth?
His lover said, “It’s been years. The girl’s growing up fast.”
“I know.”
“Why won’t you go back? Even for a visit?”
“I can’t.” Akeha wasn’t sure he could explain it in words to himself, much less someone else. Why couldn’t he return to the place of his birth? Because tigers prowled in the woods, and giant snakeheads circled in the water. He just couldn’t. “Now’s not the time.”
Yongcheow stayed silent for a few seconds, and Akeha knew the pensive expression on his face without looking. “I want to see her too.”
“I know. Someday you will. When the time is right.” An indefinite hope of things changing, a watery promise. Akeha listened to the cycle of Yongcheow’s breathing, dreading further interrogation. But none was forthcoming. Apparently satisfied with Akeha’s dilute answers, Yongcheow drifted off into sleep.
* * *
“I know what to call them.”
“What? What time is it?”
“I said, I know what to call the weapons.”
“Akeha, go back to sleep.”
“Sunballs. We should call them sunballs.”
“ . . . w
hat?”
“They explode with the brightness of the sun. We should call them sunballs.”
“You . . . I can’t believe you woke me for this.”
“I thought you would find it funny.”
“I’ll find it funny when it’s not the unmentionable crack of night. Go back to sleep, you turtle bastard.”
“I love you.”
Chapter Nineteen
THINGS STARTED TO GO WRONG after prayers at first sunrise. Pain seared through Akeha’s veins; he doubled over as though he had been shot, breath emerging in ragged gasps.
“What is it?” Yongcheow asked, alarm suffusing him as every possibility from poison to a hidden arrow to a heart attack flashed through his imagination. “Akeha!”
Akeha couldn’t answer. He staggered across the room, grasping for his pack, searching for something that burned in his mind like a coal brand. A sense of danger had hit him, an impression of suffering so powerful the blood struggled to reach his head. He felt like he was dying. Perhaps he was.
His hands found what he was looking for. A flat, black medallion of volcanic rock, its center scooped out and replaced with faceted glass. It was one half of a pair, entangled in the Slack like talkers. Thennjay had the other half. When the glass changed colors, it meant something had happened. It meant Return to the city. Something is wrong. An emergency that couldn’t wait for a letter to wend its way to them.
Akeha had carried it for years, and for years it had remained dark. Until now. In his shaking hand, the glass glowed red, the color of blood fresh from the vein.
“What is it?” Yongcheow asked. “What does it mean?”
The initial blast of pain had broken over him, leaving numb chill in its receding wake. Akeha closed white fingers around the stone. “Mokoya.”
* * *
Because they had no safe house in Bunshim, they stayed at an inn of unsavory reputation, an all-hours place where patrons could be trusted to turn a blind eye to anything. A mix of weathered scowls and wild-eyed hunger prowled its wooden interiors, selling everything from sex to drugs to murder. Akeha, having gathered his belongings, went downstairs to find someone willing to lend him a carriage.