by JY Yang
He could not get Thennjay on the talker. Whatever had happened in the capital, it was serious. Not knowing was the worst part, the part that was eating a hole in his stomach, the part that was sending his thoughts on bright and terrifying excursions. Had Mother done something? Was Mokoya hurt? Was she dead?
He thought of the sunball he carried, and of the insatiable flames that had consumed the defector’s lab in Chengbee. What if—?
All-hours establishments followed neither sun and moon nor day and night. The ground floor was unpleasantly drunk in the collar of time after first sunrise, shouts shaking the rafters and fumes of spilled wine stinging the eyes. Akeha, having put on a reasonable mask of calm, stood three steps up from the chaos and surveyed the scattershot tables for faces he recognized.
Behind him Yongcheow said, “That’s Banyar the silk merchant, isn’t it?”
Banyar owed them a favor from years back. She was tucked in a corner, plying a boy far too young for her with drink. She liked to travel in ostentatious conveyances, lacquered with gold, topped with riotous carvings, laden with more silk than a concubine’s quarters. Not the best way to slip into the capital unnoticed.
“We can ask her,” Akeha said.
As he descended, a table of revelers tore into his focus. A group of rough men, faces shiny and red and unfamiliar, squalling dialect from the lower quarters of Chengbee. The stink of money lingered around them. Akeha recognized the wretched pattern of tourists on a binge, here to taste Bunshim’s seedy delights, spending ill-gotten wealth on the golden dancers and pleasure ships in the harbor.
As he walked by their table, his anxiety expanded till it clotted his heart. Laughter peppered their conversation, which stewed in a foul delight. Some tragedy had just happened in the capital, some sort of explosion. Their oblique references were hard to parse, a story with no head and no tail. But someone had died. Someone important.
His chest twisted. Mokoya, her body dissolving in a sunball flare.
A man with a thin, wormy mustache commanded the largest share of the attention. He said, “If she was so damn powerful, how come she didn’t predict this disaster?”
The table shook under open-palmed howling. Akeha turned to him and said, “Tell me what happened.”
His companions crackled with more laughter as he said, “Oh, you haven’t heard the latest out of Chengbee?”
Slowly, through the roaring in his ears, Akeha repeated, “Tell me what happened.”
One of the man’s more observant friends tugged at his sleeve, whispered in his ear. The man squinted, suddenly hugely interested in Akeha’s face. Then his laughing returned threefold. “Oh, you’re her brother, are you? Oh, pity, pity!”
He stood up, drunk beyond all sense. “Do you see this, friends? This man, the Protector’s son, standing here, and he has no inkling! No inkling of what’s happened to his sister!” He slapped Akeha on the arm, pulled at his shoulder.
“Is she dead?” was all he could manage.
“Oh, not so, not so! But she will be soon, I hear! Too bad about that half-breed brat of hers, eh? Incinerated, I hear.”
His high, thin voice pierced like a bee sting. Mokoya’s daughter. His niece. “Incinerated.”
“Yes. Monastery went up like a firework!” As Akeha felt the skin across his knuckles tighten, the man continued crowing, “Must be a relief for your mother, huh?” His mouth was wide, full of ugly yellow teeth. “No more embarrassment from a Gauri half-breed running—”
By the time Akeha registered what he was doing, his hand was fisted in the man’s hair and a knife was halfway to his throat. It sliced clean, under the jaw, spraying him with fine, warm blood.
Akeha dropped the body first, then the knife.
The dead man’s companions shot to their feet, and he knew then that these were people who hurt other people for a living.
Air ignited over his clenched right fist. He would burn them, peel blackened skin from bubbling flesh—
“Akeha!”
Yongcheow. Akeha did not budge. He was facing five men. They would be no problem. He could see the same knowledge on their faces, as they realized who and what it was they faced. What they had unleashed.
Around him, the inn emptied in a determined, quiet fashion. The patrons had seen things like this happen before, and they didn’t like how it ended.
“Oi, oi.” Tze-Fong, the inn’s owner, moved her bulk between the abandoned tables, indignant hands on solid hips. “You going to pay for my furniture?”
Akeha did not back down. But neither did he attack.
Tze-Fong glared at the five men. “Get out,” she snapped. When they looked at each other, she said, “Did you hear me? You want him to kill you? Get out!”
They scrambled.
Only when the last of them had crossed the inn’s threshold did Akeha extinguish the flame he’d created. “Tsk,” Tze-Fong clucked, looking at the body on the floor, soaking in its own blood.
“I’m sorry for the mess,” Akeha said. His ears rang and rang and rang, a chorus of bells that had no end.
Tze-Fong’s face twisted. “Don’t need. This one, he burned one of my girls yesterday. Threw hot soup in her face. Bastard.” She kicked one splayed arm. “I’ll clean up.”
“Akeha.” Yongcheow’s warm, familiar hand descended on his shoulder. “Are you all right?”
He shook his head.
Tze-Fong sighed. “It’s true, you know. What the bastard said.”
Akeha looked at her. “My sister?”
She nodded. “I talked to somebody in the capital earlier. There was a big explosion, some accident or something. The little girl died.” She looked at Akeha’s face. “Sorry.”
“What kind of explosion, how big?”
Tze-Fong shrugged helplessly. Of course she wouldn’t know—how would she know?
“What about my sister? Did they say anything about my sister?”
“That one—don’t know, sorry. It’s all rumors only. No official announcement. Maybe won’t have one at all.”
He breathed deeply. “I need a carriage to the city.”
“I don’t have carts free. But I have one horse carriage. You want? It’s only a bit slower.”
Akeha nodded. Words had died in his mouth.
Chapter Twenty
HER NAME WAS EIEN, and she was six. At the age of three, she had told her mother she was a girl, and had not changed her mind thereafter. A light capture of her, sent by Thennjay with one of his dutiful, seasonal letters, showed a nut-brown child with bright eyes round as marbles, and fishbowl-shaped hair. The light capture came on a new kind of scroll, which looped through five seconds of the girl breaking into a gap-toothed giggle, something reminiscent of her mother in the way she ducked her head.
She liked animals and the color yellow. Outside of that, Akeha knew nothing. What her laugh sounded like. Whether she skipped while running down corridors. Or if she liked running down corridors at all.
Akeha managed to get Thennjay on the talker as they left the city. The man’s voice, iron-weight, tonelessly told Akeha what he already knew: There had been an explosion in the monastery. Eien was dead. Mokoya was grievously hurt.
An attack? Akeha had asked, fearing poisoned air and contaminated water.
No, Thennjay said, an accident. One of our own.
Something built by the Machinists had gone wrong. Not a blow dealt by the Protectorate. Not a gaping mouthful of demonic fire. Not yet.
Come quickly, Thennjay said. A carnivorous fear had hollowed out his voice. I don’t know how long she has left.
The horse carriage rattled over stones in the road. Bunshim was just a day’s travel away from the capital, but to Akeha, slowly and coolly detaching from the surface of the world, the journey was interminable. It felt like the sun rose and fell sixty times while he was trapped in that wooden box, his niece’s gift held loosely in his fingers. He couldn’t think of it as her last gift. Those words refused to settle in his mind.
He s
tared desolately at the smooth lobes and flutes of porcelain. There were scars on his palms: small ones, not-so-small ones. He tried to connect memory to each one. Nothing.
Yongcheow, leaning across the carriage, touched his face. “Akeha.”
A shudder lanced through him, pulling him back into the present. “I’m sorry.”
“There’s no need to apologize.”
“I shouldn’t have killed that man.”
Yongcheow sighed. “Probably not.” He brushed aside the curtain of Akeha’s fringe. “It’s been a while since . . .”
Akeha shut his eyes. He’d never told Yongcheow this, but he kept a tally of every person whose blood he had spilled. He tried to remember their faces and their circumstances, even if he never learned their names. It was like a mantra for him, whispered in his head on long nights when he couldn’t sleep, when he tried to remember the kind of person he was. The kind of person he had been. It started with the man with the knife in the alley, not long after he had fled the capital. And then the two boys after that, not much older than he was, just as hungry, just as desperate. On and on.
Yesterday, that tally had stood at sixty-two. Now it was sixty-three.
“Listen,” Akeha said. “You have to stay out of the city. We’ll go all the way to the border, and drop you off at the cottage there.”
“Akeha—”
“No. It’s too dangerous. For all we know, this could be a trap set by my mother. I can face her—I will face her—but I want you to stay away.” Yongcheow frowned; Akeha clamped an iron hand over his. “Please. Your research work is important. The Machinists can’t lose us both at once.”
“I can’t lose you at all,” Yongcheow whispered.
He looked away. “I’m sorry.”
The finite nature of the world meant that the horse carriage eventually did draw up to the boundary of the capital city. Akeha gave the carriage master a gold tal for his troubles and sent him on his way.
“You’ll stay hidden, won’t you?” he asked Yongcheow.
“I’ll stay hidden behind you, if you don’t let me walk by your side.”
“Yongcheow, listen—”
“No, you listen. You keep cutting me out of your family’s business, and I’ve had enough. Whatever lies in the capital scares you. I know. I understand. But it’s important to you. That makes it important to me too. I don’t want to be left out of it.”
“Do you understand the danger I’ll put you in?”
“Do I look like an idiot?” His hands met Akeha’s and latched on with a magnetic grip. “I’ll follow you anywhere, Akeha. You just have to let me.”
Yongcheow’s words were backed by the strength of mountains, by the conviction that would lead an unarmed man to stand firm against three soldiers twice his size. Akeha looked at him, really looked, and saw someone whose loss would tear a good fatal chunk out of him.
Akeha shut his eyes and offered a prayer to the Almighty.
He said, “You’ll have to stay hidden behind me. We can’t be seen together. It’s too risky. Do you understand?”
Yongcheow didn’t, not at first. But then he did, and the realization that Akeha was relenting after all dawned across his face. He nodded, his fingers betraying only a brief tremble against Akeha’s.
Chapter Twenty-one
THENNJAY MET THEM ON the steps of the monastery. “Akeha,” he said.
That rolling thunder voice had not been changed by the seasons. It was deeper, perhaps. Roughened, chafed by the weight of the world around him. But it still bore the same magnetism, the same compelling gravity that enveloped the listener in its orbit. Or maybe Akeha was comparing the present to an unreliable past. He stood in front of a man who had, for the past eighteen years, existed as little more than a voice over the talker and generous, looping script on parchment. Thennjay was no longer the lithe boy he’d once met and barely remembered. The years had broadened his chest, added heft to his leonine features. His beard flowed as freely as his abbot’s robes.
He stood waiting, tall and glorious even in his grief, and Akeha could not find it in himself to approach the man. He stopped several yields away, an ocean of missed opportunities and wasted futures roiling between them.
It was Thennjay who closed the gap, arms enveloping Akeha in a great embrace, one wrapped around his back, one cradling his head. In that rush of warmth and scent, all the anxiety and fear that had built in him finally came unbound, bursting within his chest like overripe fruit. He gripped Thennjay hard around the spine, and whispered, “I am so sorry,” over and over, eighteen years of penitence spilling from the broken dam of his lips.
Yongcheow bowed graciously when Akeha introduced him. “At last we meet,” he told the Head Abbot. “I’ve heard nothing but wild stories about you.” Thennjay extracted a smile from somewhere for Yongcheow’s sake. They should have met under happier circumstances. This, too, was Akeha’s fault.
He said: “Mokoya—is she . . .”
Thennjay looked stricken.
Akeha wet his lips. “I want to see her. Please.”
“Come,” he said.
* * *
They had put Mokoya in one of the stone halls of meditation. Breaking its age-old rules, Thennjay explained, the monastery had accepted a large number of adult initiates in recent years, and some of them had been high-ranking doctors in the Tensorate. Refugees, in so many words, but now their skills had saved Mokoya’s life.
Not saved, exactly, Thennjay told him. They had tried their best, and she was still alive, but only just.
“Tell me what happened,” Akeha said.
Eien loved animals. She especially adored the monastery’s raptor pack. Every morning, at first sunrise, Mokoya would indulgently take her to feed them.
They’d done this too, when they were children.
Except that this was a time of insurrection, and the monastery was no longer a simple house of tranquility. The backyard was home to a congregation of Machinist devices in various stages of testing. Numbered among them was a gas-compression heater.
As they found out that morning, there were flaws in its design. Fatal ones.
“Eien was the closest to the explosion,” Thennjay said. “Mokoya . . . she . . .” He gestured to the stone hall they were approaching, unable to complete his sentence.
A raised bed had been installed in the middle of the hall, a fragile thing dwarfed by the vastness around it. Two doctors stood in attendance.
Akeha’s steps forward took eternity after eternity. The patient lay half smothered in white sheets. He couldn’t focus on her face, couldn’t focus on anything. There was so much wrong, so much to look at.
Mokoya was unclothed, swathed in a sarcophagus of bandages through which red seeped like ink. Her right arm was encased in a bubbling, irregular cocoon; a cocoon that looked like it was made of living flesh; a cocoon that hummed like a thousand wasps were at work within. Above it, transparent jelly clung to the right half of her face, a thick gel that masked nothing of the seething, burnt flesh beneath. A mask of ridged gristle smothered her nose and mouth, flapping wetly like fish gills.
Underneath all of that, it was still Mokoya. His sister. The person he had come into this world with—the person he could not imagine this world without—
“They’re rebuilding her arm with a lizard graft,” Thennjay said. “But her lungs are too badly burnt. There isn’t enough healthy tissue left to rebuild them, and we can’t use a graft.”
“She’s dying,” he whispered. He wanted to touch her. He was afraid to.
Mokoya’s eyes flicked open, wide and staring.
“Moko?” He felt her come alive in the Slack, tangled in the webbing of connections the doctors had woven around her. “Moko!”
Her eyes shot back and forth, then zeroed in on his face. Her reaction—recognition—preceded a panicked response, as she struggled to sit up, clawing at the living mask with her left hand. As Akeha reached for her, the doctors burst forward with overlapping calls of “Te
nsor Sanao—”
Mokoya pulled the mask off, gasping, barely making out the words “Keha—”
“No, no.” He held her, supporting her head, her body, terrified of making things worse. “Moko, please—”
Her skin instantly slid toward grayness. Air rattled through the ruins of her throat and lungs as she clutched at Akeha’s face with her remaining hand. Her blue lips moved, trying to form words. “You came.” A misshapen smile ghosted across her face. “I wanted to see you—I—”
I’m so glad, his twin whispered in his mind. He felt relief flood her. She only wanted to see him one last time.
Another rattle. She slumped in his arms, eyes rolling backward, mouth falling open. Akeha, arms locking up, screamed her name. He couldn’t let go, she had to wake up, she had to look at him, breathe—Mokoya—
Thennjay pulled him away and clung to him, nails digging into skin, as the doctors reattached the mask and coaxed breath back into her. “She’s alive,” Thennjay whispered, holding on, rocking slightly. “She’s alive.” He said it over and over like a prayer.
Thennjay released him only when the doctors stepped back, Mokoya’s condition stabilized. Yongcheow squeezed his arm, fingers distorting the flesh. “How can I save her?” Akeha asked. His voice echoed through the hollows of his throat. He looked at Thennjay. Looked at the doctors. “How can I help?”
Thennjay said, “You’re identical twins.”
It took half a minute for Thennjay’s meaning to register in the bedlam of his mind. Akeha filled his lungs, the withered aching things hanging exhausted in his chest. He glanced at Yongcheow for a brief, confirmatory moment. “Take whatever you need,” he said. “Do it now. I want you to save her.”
Into the silence that ensued came a cascade of sound: feet, running. A breathless acolyte tumbled into the hall, white with fear. “Venerable One,” he gasped. “Protectorate troops—what do we do?”
The acolyte was little more than a child, his voice only beginning to change in his throat. “How many?” Thennjay asked.