by JY Yang
A series of brown strips crisscrossed the naga’s pale chest. There was a harness. She had missed it in the panic of her previous encounter.
A harness. That meant—
“There’s a rider,” Mokoya whispered. A human rider.
The naga beat its wings once. Phoenix braced against the displacement as it sailed to altitude.
It wasn’t going to come down. A human rider would know a trap when they saw one.
Mokoya blew air between her lips, and allowed herself one small, soft “cheebye.”
Then she tapped her wrist, where a brand-new and unflattened voice transmitter bravely waited. “Adi. There’s a problem.”
“Wah lao. What now?”
“I have to bring it down.”
“What? Mokoya—”
“Stand by.” She shut the transmitter off.
The naga was still circling overhead. Mokoya kicked twice into Phoenix’s side in warning. Then she raised her right hand over her head and tensed.
Earth-nature responded. Gravity warped in the pull of the Slack. Everything in Mokoya’s radius instantly grew tenfold heavier.
Iron-weight, the naga crashed to land. The ground shuddered, and a crown of dust rushed outward at them.
Metal-nature sang through Mokoya’s cudgel, and electricity struck the downed naga, paralyzing one wing.
Mokoya released her hold on earth-nature. The dust cloud jumped in height. She punched through it with water-nature, exposing the naga sprawled on the ground, wings spread, bellowing.
Freed from the weight, Phoenix sprinted toward the beast. Behind her was Adi’s crew, making the best of the disarray.
On the naga’s back, the rider was a thin figure cocooned in gray. Mokoya had to get to them.
She braced into a crouch as Phoenix ran up to the naga’s paralyzed shoulder. It was ten times her size, easy, radiating exhausted heat. Mokoya leapt up—
—the Slack punched into her—
—and the world tilted. The Grand Monastery. The raptor pens. This dread architecture, with all the bronze gates still intact. The chirrups of young raptors waiting to be fed. Eien’s laughter, the way her robes bounced as she skipped forward holding the bucket. The loud clicking from the heater in the center, which Mokoya knew now was the warning sign that one of its pipes, corroded by acid, was about to give way.
She wanted to scream as Eien darted away from her, tracing the path history had already mapped out for her;
the path where Mokoya watched her baby girl run toward the raptors, past the clicking heater, oblivious;
the path where Mokoya smiled indulgently, instead of scooping her up and dragging her to safety, condensing a lead-thick wall of air between them and the heater that was about to—
—vaporize in a ball of angry orange, engulfing her daughter a microsecond before the hot air and gases seared into Mokoya, screaming agony dissolving flesh and bone—
Something jerked Mokoya forward so hard her shoulders popped. Her feet found purchase, planting into something warm and shifting and hard, like muscle, like skin.
She stared into a face. Human. Swathed in gray, long-boned and milk-white. Dark eyes with an intensity that stopped the heart.
The rider. The naga’s rider had caught her.
Beneath them the naga bellowed, a wall-shaking sound that traveled up its rib cage. Then it reared. Mokoya’s feet slipped. The naga’s back rippled as it beat its wings. Air whipped fiercely up, hurricane strength: the paralysis was gone.
The familiar cyclical whine of lightcraft cascaded over the chaos, accompanied by the rhythmic syllables of battle chants. Mokoya knew that sound. She had learned it as a child; she had sung it as an adult. Thennjay. The pugilists had arrived early.
The rider’s arms shook, narrow fingers latched to Mokoya’s wrists, biting into bone. Even in the chaos, Mokoya could hear the air whistling through their lungs. Those eyes had the pull of a sun. Acting on instinct, Mokoya squeezed hers shut and tensed magnitude back into gravity, forcing the naga toward the ground.
A strange sensation enveloped her, as though a dozen fingers were tracing patterns across her soul. Mokoya swallowed air, and her eyes snapped open. The rider—a woman?—was still staring at her.
Their pale lips moved. “Forgive me.” Forgive me. A sound heard in the heart, not in the mind. The language sounded archaic and she didn’t know why.
Then, like a fishhook through the chest, her connection to the Slack was torn from her. Not destroyed, but pulled out of reach. Mokoya gasped as she detached from the world.
Great power accumulated and released. Something massive moved, like a city falling off a cliff.
“Mokoya. Mokoya!”
She was flat on her back, head throbbing, throat and tongue cottony. Sunlight poured into her eyes. Her wrists felt like they were broken.
Adi leaned farther into her field of vision. “You better not be dead. How am I supposed to explain to your brother?”
Mokoya found the shape of her mouth. “What . . .”
“You asking me?”
Mokoya sat up, and her hips groaned. Everything lay flattened in a twenty-yield radius around her. Adi’s crew was in disarray, fighting with the upset raptors. And there, with the grace of drifting petals, were the pugilists descending on the lotus-shaped plates that were the Grand Monastery’s signature lightcraft.
The naga, and its rider, were gone. Strangeness upon strangeness. Only now, in the post-adrenaline pulse of the aftermath, did Mokoya realize that they’d used the old genderless pronoun for adults, from before the language changed. A radical? That unplaceable accent.
“There was a rider,” Mokoya said. “Did you see?”
“Yah, I’m not blind. Who was it? A Tensor?”
“Maybe. I don’t know.” She’d never seen slackcraft done that way. And Tensors were so strict about the proper methods. “They took my slackcrafting ability and used it to—” Words failed her. “I don’t know what they did.”
“The whole naga disappeared. Just like that.” Adi snapped her fingers. “Crazy.”
The last of the pugilists, his robes oxblood and saffron, disembarked from his lightcraft. As he dropped to the ground he called out, “Hoy!”
Phoenix sprang to meet the tall figure in delight, her feet kicking up compacted sand. “Hey, girl, hey,” Thennjay said, staggering under the assault of her massive snout. “How are you, girl? Hey, hey.”
Thennjay Satyaparathnam liked to say he had achieved two distinctions in life: becoming youngest Head Abbot in the history of the Grand Monastery, and also its tallest. Mokoya liked to add that he was also the Head Abbot who had discarded the greatest number of monastic vows—most notably that of chastity—so perhaps there should be a third distinction.
The son of a fire breather and a stilt walker, Thennjay had once thought he would spend his life in a circus, doing magic tricks and juggling things for money. Then Mokoya received her vision. The fortunes had intervened. He became the Gauri street mutt turned Head Abbot. At their wedding, he had made the predictable “I was the man of her dreams” joke, and Mokoya had almost managed not to punch him. She had made him pay for it that night.
Mokoya found her feet and folded her arms as he approached. “Well, look who I found,” he said.
“What are you doing out here, Thenn?”
“You know,” he said, looking out at the ruined landscape. “Just seeing the sights.”
She didn’t unfold her arms. He sighed. “Akeha told me where to find you. Seemed like you needed help.”
“When I need help, I ask.”
“Do you?”
Mokoya’s lips tightened.
Adi nodded at Thennjay. They corresponded sometimes, a fact that Mokoya did her best to ignore. “Ey, Mister Head Abbot,” her captain said brightly, “how’s life in the Grand Monastery?”
He laughed. “It’s been better. Like those days before my beloved ran off to hunt naga in the wilderness.”
Adi snorted. Mokoya
didn’t laugh. Silence descended around them. Thennjay looked at the floor.
Adi sighed. “Okay. Come, lah, got a lot of work to do.” Something in the background caught her attention, a boneheaded nephew: “Oei, Faizal! It’s backward, lah! Bodoh.” She scuttled off to handle the situation. A graceful exit, all things considered.
Thennjay studied Mokoya’s face carefully. “It’s good to see you, Nao,” he said, gently.
“Good for you,” she said. Her chest twinged as she said it, like someone had pulled a string too hard and it had snapped, but she wasn’t about to take it back. She ducked down to pick her cudgel off the floor, refusing to look at Thennjay’s face. She imagined it must hurt still, after all these years, her brushing him off. She didn’t want to know.
Chapter Four
“I TOLD YOU we shouldn’t have gone after it,” Yongcheow said. His chin was pointed in Mokoya’s direction, bright and bitter triumph shining on his face.
“Come on,” Thennjay said. “Now’s hardly the time . . .”
They had retreated to camp. Sunfall was imminent, marking the end of the day-cycles. A pot of stew was boiling somewhere among the tents, spicing the air with notes of cardamom and star anise. Good to know someone still had appetite left.
Yongcheow ignored Thennjay. “You didn’t want to listen, did you? You never listen.”
“Did anyone die?” Mokoya snapped. When nobody responded, she said, “No. Nobody died. And we learned something important.” She stared at Yongcheow. “Which we wouldn’t have if we’d stayed in our tents.”
Adi said, “The two of you are really getting on my nerves.”
Thennjay’s deep voice rumbled over their exchanges. “Right now the most important thing is to decide what we do next.”
“I’m going back to Bataanar,” Yongcheow said. “I need to talk to the Machinist leadership. Lady Han must hear of this. I can’t speak to her here.”
“Oh, good. So there’s no need for discussion, then,” Mokoya said.
“Nao—”
“I’m not going back,” Mokoya said. “That naga is still loose in the desert. We need to find out where it’s gone.”
“Yah,” Adi said. “Sooner or later it’ll come back. We need to be prepared.”
“It doesn’t have to be one or the other,” Thennjay said. “We can split up. Half the pugilists can follow Yongcheow to Bataanar, just in case. The other half can stay here—with you—and try to track that creature down.” He hesitated. “I’ll stay with you.”
Mokoya fastened her arms across her chest. “We don’t need your help.”
“Hello,” Adi said. “You don’t put words in my mouth, okay? I want him to stay. You think you one person enough to stop that thing?”
“Fine,” Mokoya said. “Do whatever. I don’t care.” It was Adi’s crew. She was tired and her hip hurt and her chest hurt, and people could do whatever they wanted; it didn’t concern her. She turned and walked away.
* * *
The edge of the Copper Oasis lay a hundred yields from the camp, its borders tender and marshy, its waters glossy black and unfathomable in the moonlight. Mokoya stood in front of that broad mirror, vast enough to vanish into the horizon, and wondered what it would be like to walk into its cool embrace, to let the oasis close its gentle hands over her head. She imagined silence, darkness, eternal bliss. Her lungs finally full and content.
She snapped herself out of her reverie. There was still plenty of work to do.
The vision of Eien’s death lay curled like a fist on her belt, an explosive housed in thin glass walls. She thought about hurling it into the dark as hard as she could, gifting the oasis its oil-slick contents. But she didn’t have that many capture pearls to waste. Gingerly she removed it from the capture box and undid the knots in the Slack. Light dissipated as the memory was cast back into nothingness, where it belonged.
She wanted to vomit.
Behind her, oasis grass rustled. Mokoya knew who it was before she spoke: Adi, come to make sure Mokoya was all right, as if she didn’t have enough to worry about herself.
“I’m fine,” Mokoya said preemptively. And then, sensing that this was too much of a lie even for her, amended it to “I’ll be fine.”
Adi stood next to her and sighed. “Mokoya, I’m sorry.”
“What are you apologizing for?”
“The death anniversary is tomorrow, right? I forgot. That’s why you’re so moody.”
“It’s . . .” Adi wasn’t wrong. “It’s nothing, compared with everything else going on. I should be the one apologizing.” She shook her head. “I know Yongcheow’s just trying to help.”
“And your husband also.”
“And him too.”
They looked out over the waters in silence.
“I’m sorry,” Mokoya said. “I know I shouldn’t be like this. It’s been four years. I should be better. But . . .” She pushed at blades of oasis grass with her toes. “It hasn’t gotten better. I thought it would get better.”
“It won’t get better just because you want it.”
Mokoya listened to the soft sound of water fidgeting against the land.
Adi looked at the moon. “You know, my son died ten years ago. So long ago. All the other small ones, grown big already. But I still get sad on his birthday.” As Mokoya managed her breathing, the smallest chuckle escaped her friend. “Birth day, death day. Same day.”
There was a crack in Adi’s voice, the barest hint of a wobble. That was enough for Mokoya to come undone. Adi stood by while she struggled through the wave of emotions that swept her, not saying anything, just being there.
When she could speak again she said, “I’m sorry, Adi. And . . . thank you.”
Another rustle in the grass. This time, it was Yongcheow, and from his expression, she knew that he’d been sent by Thennjay, to fuss over her like an injured child. He froze when he caught sight of Mokoya’s face.
“You don’t have to apologize,” she said, before he could start.
He had stopped several yields away from her. “I . . . must. I’ve acted uncharitably toward you.”
“I tend to bring that out in people.”
“Mokoya, I . . . I regret my behavior. I should have been gentler.”
“There’s no need to apologize.”
Yongcheow looked like he was about to say something more. Instead, he glanced away, wetting his cracked lips.
Mokoya said, “And you, do you return to Bataanar now?”
“Yes.”
She nodded. “Send Akeha my regards. Tell him . . .” She tried to think of something smart and pithy to say. “Tell him not to blow anything up.”
Yongcheow sighed. “Please, stay safe. I don’t know how I would deal with him if something happens to you.”
* * *
Mokoya found Thennjay playing a game with Phoenix just beyond the boundary of the tents. Fist-sized chunks of jerky lay in his lap, hammocked in the folds of his robes. “Ready, girl?”
Phoenix’s tail feathers rustled. He hefted a chunk, testing its weight. “Okay, get it!”
Thwack. “That’s a good girl. Come on, get this one.”
Mokoya leaned against the side of Thennjay’s tent and watched the trajectories of several more treats. Thennjay’s laugh had the same deep growl it did when he used to play with Eien.
She thought, I miss this. I miss happiness. It sounded even sadder when put into words.
“I know I have shapely shoulders,” Thennjay finally said, without turning around, “but you could come talk to my face. It’s just as attractive, you know.”
Mokoya huffed, but came toward him anyway. She had brought a peace offering wrapped in cloth: a warm clay pot, fragrant with shallot oil. “Dinner,” she said. “Peanut congee.”
He lifted the lid and sniffed. “I was hoping for some meat bone tea. Akeha says Yongcheow’s has to be tried.”
In the kitchen, Yongcheow had once managed to set a pan of water on fire. “Oh. You’re making a
joke.”
He smiled at her. She let him.
As he tucked into the congee, Mokoya carefully sat next to him, hooking her arms around her knees. Phoenix rolled onto the sand in front of them and let out a slow, satisfied breath of air.
“She knows who you are,” Mokoya said, pointedly.
Around a mouthful of food, Thennjay countered, “She remembers that I helped raise her for several years. Any raptor from the monastery would do the same.” He swallowed. “It doesn’t mean she’s special, Nao.”
This was an old argument between them, perhaps too old. Mokoya had left the Grand Monastery after she grew sick of hearing every iteration, every branch of the conversation. She didn’t know why she was still arguing it.
Phoenix snuffled, and sand blew up in a cloud. Mokoya listened to the soft song of the desert winds, much calmer than they had been a sun-cycle ago.
Eventually, she said, “Why are you here, Thennjay?”
“Do you really have to ask?”
She shrugged. Yes, no. Who knew?
Thennjay put the clay pot down. Gentle fingers parted the fringe of hair skirting the bones of her neck, as though he were studying the scars that blossomed from her shoulder. “I wanted to see you.”
Mokoya pushed her toes deeper into the sand. He said, “I spent two anniversaries alone. It was miserable. And I knew asking you to come back wouldn’t work, so . . .” He shrugged and slapped his thighs. “The eagle moves where the mountain cannot.”
“So this was your idea? Not Akeha’s?”
“Well. If you need to, you can split the blame between us.” A half smile emerged on his expression. “Admit it—it helps having us around.”
She studied his profile in the milky sunball light. “It’s a long way to travel from Chengbee. You could have just called.”
“I wanted to see you,” he repeated.
She let that hang in the air between them. A significant part of her, centered in her chest, wanted to let her knees fall and rest against his. Wanted to settle her body weight against his and go to sleep, as though they lived in brighter and easier times.