by JY Yang
Mokoya sucked in a breath. A logical person would say, Yes, let’s do that. Let’s put aside all doubts. But the hurt she’d glimpsed on Rider’s face left a lingering chill. She felt that agreeing to this would put a permanent wall of mistrust between them. Any hope of a normal relationship would be crushed under its weight.
So she resisted. She dug her heels in against the pull of logic. She said, against her better instincts, “You don’t have to do that. I trust you.” A hundred starlings took flight in her chest as she mouthed the words.
Her declaration didn’t lift Rider’s mood as she had expected. If anything, the frown on their face deepened. “Do you? Why?”
“I trust you more than I trust Tan Khimyan,” she said, and that part was true as the sun’s path across the sky. “Besides,” she said, as the thought occurred to her, “her theory doesn’t hold weight. Like you told me, you need to put in an anchor point to travel long distances.”
“Yes, that is true,” Rider said slowly, latching on to her idea. “Not knowing what lies inside her compound, I would not risk folding in without an anchor. Not even if I were close by.”
Yes. Mokoya felt foolish. The facts were so clear, she felt embarrassed for not realizing this earlier. But Tan Khimyan had unnerved her so much, she hadn’t been thinking straight. She recalled the geography of the woman’s receiving chamber, with all its death traps, and a small laugh burst free. “She’s got a tiger in a cage. A blind jump would be a terrible idea.”
Rider reacted with a spark of recognition. “A tiger? Oh, I cannot believe she brought Khun with her. Poor Khun! He hated the summer. He must be miserable in this heat.” They leaned into Mokoya’s inner space, sharp and curious. “How does he fare? He was barely out of cubhood when I left.”
“He’s definitely not a cub now. He would probably swallow you in four bites. If you happened to jump into his cage, that is.”
And finally, Rider smiled. The discomfort between them washed away in the light of that small gesture. Mokoya felt her nerves ease for the first time since she’d entered the tent. What a fool she had been. Rider had risked their life to protect Bataanar. They had fought the naga together. Why had she believed Tan Khimyan in the first place?
Rider’s fingers brushed against her fringe, tracing topographies on the gnarled skin of her cheek. “Are you well, Mokoya? The past day has been hard on you.”
She chuckled lightly and pulled them into a gentle embrace. “I’ve had worse days. And I’m glad you’ve recovered.”
Rider sucked on their lower lip and coyly said, “I could show you how well I’ve recovered, if you like.”
Mokoya laughed and let Rider kiss her. But she made sure the kiss was contained and kept firm her grip on Rider’s hands so they weren’t tempted to slip past the point of no return. “I can’t, not now. I need to talk to my brother.”
Chapter Eleven
SECOND-SUNRISE GLIMMERED in the sky as Mokoya plunged back into Bataanar’s labyrinthine anatomy. The city’s public spaces were hemorrhaging people under the pressure of the raja’s sunup curfew, and she found herself a solitary figure wandering the hollow bones of streets, with only an occasional straggler and a circulation of iron locusts, looming and vigilant, to keep her company. Stripped of life, the white walls of the city appeared bleached by the brightening sun.
Across the city from the oasis gate, the main royal guardhouse perched on the eastern city wall, a squat edifice of dull brick protruding from the fortifications. Mokoya’s way up was barred by two of the city guard, set across the bottom of the stairwell. Both of them were tall as she was, and half again as broad.
“Entry is forbidden,” said the one on the left, a woman.
“You shouldn’t be out here anyway,” said the one on the right. He looked too young to be holding a job like this. “There’s a curfew on.”
“I’m here to see my brother,” Mokoya said, impatient. “Your captain.”
Confusion blurred the boy guard’s syllables. “We don’t allow family visits—”
“Zak, wait.” His colleague frowned at Mokoya, studying the planes of her face, the broad collection of scars. “Right, you are Captain Sanao’s sister, I’ll believe that. But we weren’t told to expect anyone.”
“I just spoke to Akeha on the talker, not a half hour ago. He knows I’m coming.” This was a fucking waste of time. She thought about cracking their skulls together and leaving them heaped at the bottom of the stairs. She might, if they delayed her further.
“Let me check,” the woman said.
She pushed back a sleeve, exposing the voice transmitter strapped to her wrist. Mokoya blinked. It was an open secret that the city guard sheltered the Machinist rebellion in Bataanar, but parading Machinist technology under the raja’s nose was a fresh, trenchant show of boldness.
The woman tapped the transmitter. Metallic noise screeched from it before Akeha’s voice surged through, thick with irritation: “What is it now?”
“It’s Lao. Your sister’s h—”
“Is your head rotting? Send her up. Stop wasting my time.”
The signal dropped like a man with his throat cut. Lao smiled thinly at Mokoya. “Well. You heard the boss.”
He hadn’t let her finish a third word. That was impressive, even for Akeha. The meeting with the raja must not have gone well.
In the gloom at the top of the stairs stood the guardroom door, metal-boned and solid in its frame. Mokoya pushed it open.
Light and chaos swallowed her.
If the transmitter had been a brazen display of Machinist affiliation, Mokoya was stepping into the beating, brawling heart of that daring. The guardroom boiled with enclosed sweat and steam, heated by glass balls of light that hung from an overhead forest of wires. Machine schematics papered the walls. Fifty-odd faces turned to stare at her, distracted from their tasks: Stacking boxes. Opening boxes. Screen-printing circulars. At one long table, about ten people sat, halfway through assembling and polishing guns.
Over this manifold scene of arrested productivity towered the biggest generator Mokoya had ever seen, a gourd-shaped bronze furnace on a triplet of clawed legs, attended to by a forest of thick pipes. The air in the room surged tidally as it thrummed and purred, a breath cycle to rival a naga’s.
Mokoya looked at the burnt patina of lilac bruises on the generator’s skin, imagined pressing the flesh of her wrists against it, and shuddered through a memory of the Grand Monastery in the seconds before the explosion.
“Nao! You’re alive.”
The present day called. Around a table overflowing with scrolls and journals stood Thennjay and Akeha, their calculated distance and folded arms calcified around an argument she had missed.
“Yes,” she said. “Yes, I am.”
Behind the table’s accrued detritus sat Yongcheow, one foot propped up on his stool, flipping through a journal with determined nonchalance.
“What did Tan Khimyan want from you?” Akeha asked.
“Nothing important. She tried to blame Rider for the naga attack. She thought I might believe her.”
He squinted. “Who’s Rider?”
“My friend. In the tent.”
She could tell that Akeha had forgotten who they were, and she took vindictive pleasure at his internal struggle. Serves him right for not paying attention. She pressed forward, sidestepping his discomfort: “What’s happening now?”
Akeha shook his head as he resurfaced. “What does it look like?” During their conversation, the guardroom had returned to swarming industriousness. Somebody hammered at something, a sound of wood against metal. In the background, the generator hummed and clicked. It was very loud.
“He’s preparing for war,” Thennjay said.
He. Not we. “You’d prefer to do something else,” she said.
Akeha, talking over Thennjay, gibed: “He’d prefer we bang our foreheads against a wall until they bleed.”
“Bengang Baru only happened because its mayor helped,” Thennj
ay insisted. Mokoya recognized his tone; it was the one he used in quarrels he’d already lost a dozen times. “We could still turn things around here.”
In between them, fixated on pages of his journal, Yongcheow muttered, “I still think we should be prepared in case the naga comes back.”
“It won’t come back,” Akeha snapped. “Tan Khimyan has gotten what she wants. The troops are already on their way. Why would she need another attack?”
Yongcheow shrugged. “It would be better if we fixed that shield. Surely you can spare an engineer or two.”
“Who would then be wasting time repairing it, instead of making sure everybody has weapons that work.”
Yongcheow shrugged again. He flipped a page.
Was it her imagination, or had the generator’s clicking grown louder? She turned her head to listen. She swore its mechanical aspiration had sped up.
Thennjay said, “Akeha, preparing for a street battle is a mistake. It’s going to be a bloodbath.”
“What choice do I have? The Protectorate comes in two days. And Choonghey won’t change his mind. Don’t be a fool.” One of his guards stood shiftily by the side, clutching a scroll in her hands. Akeha waved her over.
“I told you we’ve focused on the wrong person,” Thennjay said, as Akeha inspected the list the girl presented him. “He’s an old man. Old men are like donkeys: they’re stubborn, and they’ll kick you every chance they get. We need to talk to his daughter. Use her to influence him.”
“The oasis gate needs more medics,” Akeha told his underling. “Ask Anh to see if there might be more volunteers from the clans.” As she hurried off, he turned on Thennjay. “You want to use an eighteen-year-old girl?”
“She’s old enough.”
“Old enough for what?”
The clicking was definitely louder. The surge, recede, surge, recede of the thrumming accelerated in pace with her heartbeat. It was going to blow. She couldn’t save them all. She wouldn’t move fast enough to fling herself in between. Maybe she could make a barrier, throw it around Akeha and Thennjay. Maybe she should make that barrier, right now. Now, before—
“Nao? What is it?”
Her heart stopped in her chest, then started again. They were looking at her, all three of them, and she realized they were waiting for her answer. What had they been discussing? Something about Wanbeng. Something like, if she failed and there was war and hundreds died, how would she feel? Something.
Numbness sparked through her hands, paralyzed her tongue. She found movement from somewhere and said, “Wanbeng is no wilting flower. We should talk to her.” Her voice wobbled, but at least the words that came out of her were human.
Akeha looked at her longer than necessary. Then he allowed himself a long, angry sigh. “Fine. Go chase your water mirages. Leave me alone to do the real work.”
She said, to his petulant outburst, “What’s the harm in talking to her?”
Akeha’s only response was to storm away. He gestured to another of his guards and began speaking to him, his back turned to them, his words too low to make out.
There was no point arguing with Akeha when he got in a mood. Mokoya touched Thennjay’s arm lightly. “Let’s go.”
Thennjay turned to follow her, but when she’d pushed the guardroom door open, Akeha’s voice rang out over the clamor. “If it were your daughter, would you say what’s the harm?”
Mokoya’s lips curled as the question hit like a punch, but it was Thennjay who growled, “You dare?”
Akeha’s face flickered with unreadable emotion. Mokoya tugged at Thennjay. “Come.” There was no use in lingering further.
Chapter Twelve
THE SUN LURCHED THROUGH the pale sky as they threaded through the empty shells of Bataanar’s streets. Second-sunfall wouldn’t be for another hour yet. Mokoya linked her arm with Thennjay’s, the yellow of her skin changing spectrum against his warmth.
Thennjay was silent, letting the heaviness of his footsteps and the uncharacteristic shallowness of his breath speak for him. Mokoya, squeezing his arm, allowed him his solitude. Her husband hardly ever talked about how Eien’s death affected him. In the tangle of months following the accident, he had been the calm center in the storm of Mokoya’s emotions, holding on to her as she raged and fought. It was easy to believe that he had simply risen above the base nature of humanity. Easy to believe that he, in his meditative way, had peacefully accepted what the fortunes had dealt him.
It had infuriated her. She wanted him to grieve as she had grieved. She would lash out at him, throw breakable items, call him heartless, monstrous. But she never managed to shatter his calm.
In the years that passed after she left him for a vagrant’s life, she’d had time to consider what those first few weeks must have been like for him: his child dead and his wife lying in a sickbed, fighting not to follow after her. After she recovered, he would often take her right hand and squeeze it, whether in bed or in the middle of an argument. At the time, she’d thought it was meant to comfort her, but she wasn’t the one who’d needed comforting. Mokoya pictured the way it had become reflex in the days he stood over her broken body and counted her breaths. How he would touch the flesh of her right arm, because as long as her body was accepting the new graft, it wasn’t dying.
Sometimes she would wonder: Did he cry? Or did he keep his emotions bound, as always?
“What really happened when you met Tan Khimyan?” he asked.
Bataanar became solid brick around her once more. “I told you,” she said. “She accused Rider of calling the naga to the city.”
“And you don’t believe her, do you?”
She remembered the conversation in the tent and the comforting conviction she had mustered. “Of course not. I trust Rider.”
“All right,” Thennjay said. “I’ll believe that.”
“What is this about, Thenn?”
“Back in the guardroom, you went somewhere else. Something really upset you. I thought it might have been Tan Khimyan.”
“No. It’s just . . .” Everything, she wanted to say. “The past two days have been very stressful. You do remember today’s the anniversary, don’t you?”
“Yes, Nao,” he said patiently. “I do.”
At least there was a specific trigger for the guardroom incident. “It was the generator,” she explained. “Its size, and the noise . . .” The ache of panic lingered in her chest, even with time and space insulating her from that room. Trying to ease Thennjay’s worry, she added, “Generators don’t usually affect me like this. It was just this one, and with everything that’s been going on . . .”
“Oh, Nao.” He tightened his grip on her arm.
Led by Thennjay, they kept a steady pace, each step crossing one of the flat rectangular tiles that made up Bataanar’s roads. With the curfew still on, it felt like the two of them were the only things left alive in the world.
“I’m not well,” she finally admitted, setting free the swarm of locusts that had nested inside her for far too long. “I thought I would return to the monastery when I got better. But I’m not getting any better. I’m afraid all the time, I can’t control my thoughts. I don’t know how long I can go on like this.”
Thennjay said nothing. Just listened.
She said, “You know what’s the worst part?”
His voice was soft. “What is, Nao?”
“I miss having prophecies.” She shook her head. “All my life I resented them. I hated being shown things and knowing I couldn’t change them. Now? I want them back. At least I could be sure of my prophecies.”
Thennjay walked a few steps in silence. “Do you think they’ll ever return to you?”
“No. I don’t know.” Something stirred in the depths of her consciousness, a memory of something odd. Mokoya’s steps slowed as she pulled on that murky thread, trying to reel in the thought attached to it. “Rider said something strange to me when they were teaching me to fold the Slack. They thought I had been actively seekin
g out prophecies.”
“Did you tell them the truth?”
“I did. And they left it alone. But it was a shocking thing to hear. As if I’d made a choice not to have them anymore.”
Mokoya’s thoughts rolled further than her words dared to. When she’d folded the Slack earlier, she’d been stunned by how easily it came to her. It felt almost like muscle memory, as though she were echoing something she’d done all her life.
An ice-water thought washed over her and cascaded down her spine. What if she could, in fact, choose where and when to see the prophecies?
Thennjay had turned down a different path of thought. “Are you sure you’d want the ability to control them?”
She had no answer to that.
As they came in sight of the raja’s palace, Thennjay said, “Nao. If you want something to be sure of, I can give you one.”
She met his gaze, and there was infinite tenderness in it. “The monastery will always be open to you,” he said. “And you will find me waiting there. Always. No matter how long it takes.”
* * *
“I don’t know what you think I can do,” Princess Wanbeng declared. “And I don’t know why you think I’d do it.” With her white-clad back to them, it was impossible to make out the girl’s expression, but the contempt in her voice made that unnecessary.
“This concerns the fate of Bataanar,” Thennjay said. “This city is your home. You must care about it, even just a little bit.”
Princess Wanbeng’s room occupied the top floor of the library tower, drowned in light pouring from stone-carved windows the right size and height to jump out of. High above them sat a dome of mountain glass. Woven with slackcraft, the glass was clear under starlight, and hard and opaque as mortar when the sun rose. Shelves and bookcases cluttered the circular room, whose contents told nothing of the owner save that she cared nothing for order and that she liked horses.