by JY Yang
“For my family?” Raja Choonghey’s voice was a blade, cutting through the slow chill of the cell. “You destroyed my family.”
Beside Mokoya, Rider had gone tense at the sight of their former lover. She reached for their clenched fist and worked her fingers into it, although she wasn’t sure who was comforting whom.
Raja Choonghey was thinner than in the pictures and looked older than Mokoya had expected. Shadows carved relief into the landscape of his face; his brow was bisected by a valley of old worries, and his mouth was framed by a deep furrow on either side. His hair, at fifty, was milk-white.
“You told me Ponchak died. You said you couldn’t save her.” He hurled something in her direction: a book, which struck the iron grille and thumped to the floor spine first, falling open at her feet. Mokoya recognized the logbook Wanbeng had thrown at her, battered from its ordeal in the library tower. “You turned her into this creature.”
“Ponchak volunteered for the experiment,” Tan Khimyan said. “She was obsessed with immortality. You may deny it as much as you like, but you know it to be true.”
“And yet you did nothing!”
“I argued against this atrocity! But my colleagues would not listen. They wanted a Tensor soul.”
“And did you stop them? No! You are just as guilty as they are. I should have your head, you worthless snake.”
Rider interrupted their exchange. “Executing her will not solve our problems.”
The raja turned, frowning at the one who dared to speak without being spoken to. For the first time, he seemed to notice the presence of others in the room. “Who are you?”
“I am Rider. We have met, although I think you do not remember.”
The raja studied Rider like a dead animal he was trying to identify. Slow, disdainful recognition spread. “No, no. I do remember you. You were this woman’s pet, weren’t you?” He hacked out a laugh. “Yes, you were her little amusement. No wonder you keep such contemptible company now. Like that one.” He looked at Akeha, a sneer distorting his face.
“Of course expecting gratitude from you would be too much,” Akeha said. “We merely saved your city from destruction.”
“Your Greatness,” Thennjay said, “little will be achieved by our quarreling. Your daughter’s safety should be our main concern.”
“Oh? Are you saying it isn’t my main concern?” Raja Choonghey had a voice like vinegar: colorless, but with the ability to eat through metal. “You should be more careful with your words, Venerable One.”
Thennjay bowed in apology. “I apologize for my rudeness.”
“We can help you,” Mokoya said. “We know where to find Wanbeng.”
A brief shudder went through the raja, and that quake unearthed a glimpse of an exhausted, grieving father, a man Mokoya could empathize with. Then suspicion clouded his features. “And how would you know that?”
“I saw it in a prophecy,” she said quietly.
A hush smothered the room. Fear flickered in the raja’s expression. “What did you see? Did you see her? Was Wanbeng hurt?”
“I—” Mokoya exhaled. “I don’t know. You should look for yourself.” The room’s chill glacial creep was claiming her bones, and the damper’s droning song hurt her head. “But not here.”
Pride held the raja’s stone-edged demeanor in place as he surveyed them. His mouth twisted, very slightly, as he met Akeha’s defiant gaze. “Very well,” he finally said. He instructed the guard at the door to “watch that snake in her box,” and left the room without looking back.
As they followed in his wake, Tan Khimyan called out, “Swallow!”
Rider hesitated, took a faltering half step forward, then turned to face their former lover. They said nothing; there was no need. Their face was a graven message.
“This turn of events must please you,” she said.
“Nothing about this sequence of events pleases me,” Rider said.
“But you have what you want now, do you not?” She spread her hands, indicating her imprisonment.
“Again, you understand nothing of what I want.”
“Don’t I? I was a victim of your scheme. Now you have moved on. You’ve found a bigger, juicier fish to suck dry.” She laughed. “One no less than the Protector’s own daught—”
Mokoya’s hand snapped up into a fist. Water-nature tightened around Tan Khimyan’s neck. Her words cut off, and her face contorted, hands scrabbling for air. The damper in the cell was no match for Mokoya’s rage, tar-black and potent.
“Mokoya,” Rider gasped.
“If the raja decides to execute you, I will encourage him,” she hissed at the imprisoned woman.
Tan Khimyan’s face purpled like fruit ripening. Rider threw themselves around Mokoya, their trembling arms latching in the small of her back. “Mokoya. Please, stop.”
They only detached themselves when Mokoya let go of Tan Khimyan’s trachea. Akeha was laughing. “Well done, Moko. I’ve wanted to do that for years.”
Thennjay cleared his throat. “We should not keep the raja waiting,” he said. “Come.”
Chapter Seventeen
IT WAS STRANGE, Mokoya thought, watching a prophecy from outside her head.
In the raja’s receiving chambers, cracked and disheveled from the naga’s attack, Rider generated their geometrical tessellations that both bypassed and encompassed all five natures of the Slack. The capture pearl in their hands pierced the air with strange light. Above the table they had gathered around, the prophecy came to life in a blur of moving images and distorted sound.
The events still lingered in her head: half memory, half nightmare. For a moment, watching her other self grieve over Rider’s body, Mokoya had a sense that she was not real. That she was not a person, but merely a mirage invented by the fortunes. She shivered. Around the table a bouquet of emotions played out on faces: shock on the raja’s, sorrow on Thennjay’s, anger on Akeha’s. Rider’s expression was impenetrable.
The prophecy ended as she remembered, leaving unnerved silence in its wake. Rider allowed the audience to absorb what they had just seen.
Thennjay met Mokoya’s gaze, his eyes sad. She looked away. The feeling that she existed on a different plane of the world from everyone else had stayed with her.
“This gives us enough landmarks to locate the naga,” Rider said.
The raja wet his lips. “Was that real?” he asked, gesturing at the air where the prophecy had been.
Akeha tilted his head. “Are you questioning a prophet’s vision?”
He swallowed. The scene—blood, death, grief—had clearly shaken him. “Then you will die,” he said to Rider.
“Indeed. It is a fate I have accepted.”
Raja Choonghey moved away from the table and paced impatiently. The pop of his knuckles as he cracked them was the only sound in the room. His frown burrowed more deeply into his face. “But the vision did not show my daughter’s fate.”
“No,” Rider said. “And that is good. She should not be there. In my plan we would take her to safety before I deal with the naga.” They pointed. “Mokoya will do it. She has learned skills that allow her to travel instantaneously.”
Mokoya’s cheeks burned at this tiny betrayal, at Rider roping her into their suicide mission without her consent, but she said nothing.
Raja Choonghey rubbed his face. “This is madness,” he said. “I can’t risk my daughter’s life on these illusions.”
“These illusions are proven,” Rider said.
“Do you have a better plan?” Akeha added.
The raja struck him with a glare, jawbone milling through his anger. Finally he said to Rider, “Very well. If that is your choice, then that is what we shall do.”
* * *
As they were leaving the chamber, Thennjay caught Mokoya by the arm to draw her aside. “Nao . . .” he said. His expression did the rest of the talking for him.
“Don’t worry about me,” she replied, flat and practiced, like she was reading off th
e lines of the First Sutra.
He rubbed the skin of her lizard arm, where the colors had faded to a muddy blue-gray. “I can’t help it.”
Mokoya wanted to say, It’s all right, I’m all right, everything is going to be all right. But faking a smile required energy; steadying her voice required strength. And she felt emptied of both.
So she said, “I’m tired,” and leaned into his bulk. Thennjay wrapped his warm, solid arms around her. Mokoya imagined herself dissolving in his embrace, her molecules scattering unconscious and pain-free to the ends of the known world.
All her life she had been stalked by a particular shadow of fear. In its teeth this specter held visions in which her loved ones were hurt and killed. She would lie awake at night, feeling the prickle of a prophecy creeping toward her, and be terrified of falling asleep, just in case she woke to a vision of Thennjay succumbing to poison, or Akeha lying in a back alley with a blade through his heart.
When the accident killed her daughter, she had been furious at the shadow for betraying her, for not showing her an actual tragedy when it was about to happen. She had wanted to know, or thought she had wanted to know. Sometimes she thought this anger was what had driven her prophetic ability away.
Now it had returned after many years, and it had brought her this gift as though mocking her. She had been wrong. She did not want to know. It was not making the pain any easier.
Thennjay held her until she somehow found the will to separate from him. “Go to them,” he said softly. “You still have time.”
* * *
Rider had fled to the tent city, as though they could not stand to be in Bataanar a moment longer than necessary. When Mokoya found them, they were crouched by Bramble, stroking the naga’s snout as they whispered in a language Mokoya did not know. She stood watching them, afraid of shattering this moment of languid tenderness.
Rider looked up. “Mokoya.”
She approached them slowly, her limbs heavy as though she dragged a promise of violence in her wake. Rider looked at her, patient, waiting for her to speak.
“She was the one who hit you,” Mokoya finally said. “Tan Khimyan.”
“It’s past,” Rider said. “It does not matter.”
“The past always matters,” Mokoya said. Especially when there was no future to hold on to.
Rider nodded slowly. “She often got into bad moods. And it would be my fault, for behaving so badly, for provoking her temper. She would say those things to me.”
“You weren’t to blame. Violence is the fault of the one enacting it. Always.”
“I know that, Mokoya. I know now.”
She touched their face gently, trailed fingers down their chin and the tendons of their neck, ending at the border of words spelling Rider’s life story. “Why didn’t you just leave, then?” Not an accusation, but curiosity. She wanted to understand Rider.
“Because I loved her, Mokoya. Because I was a fool back then, terrified by a city and a world I did not understand.” They hesitated. “And because of my daughter.”
Mokoya froze. “Your daughter?”
Rider broke away to search through one of Bramble’s saddlebags. They returned with a picture scroll, which they unrolled and tensed to life. The thin brown sheet lit up with a looping, repeating sliver of life: an olive-skinned young woman, generously dimpled, laughing in the sunlight.
“This is Echo,” Rider said. “She was an orphan I met on streets of Chengbee years ago. All the time we lived in the capital, Khimyan never suspected I was helping raise a girl in a workshop in the Lower Quarter.”
The girl had such a lightness to her smile, a radiant glow of hope. “Where is she now?”
“She lives in Chengbee still. She is grown now, a dragonboat jouster and an apprentice to a medicine seller.” They pressed the scroll into Mokoya’s hands. “When this is over, will you look for her? For my sake?”
She cradled the scroll between her fingers. “What should I tell her?”
“Tell her I died protecting those I care for. She will understand.”
Who was Rider protecting, and from what? Mokoya nodded anyway. “What else will you have me do?”
“I would ask you to watch Bramble.” Behind them, the naga rumbled at mention of her name. “She will stay behind when we execute the plan. Since she did not feature in your prophecy, her fate is not yet locked. I would like her to survive.”
Mokoya frowned at their phrasing, her fate is not yet locked. It struck her as strange, for reasons she could not identify. Rider continued, “Bramble has never lived without human companionship. She would not survive in the wild.”
“Phoenix won’t object to a playmate,” she allowed. “Anything else?”
“My bones.” As Mokoya sucked in a breath, they said, “They will be a record of who I am . . . who I was. I would like you to keep them. Your husband could perform the death rituals, could he not?”
She wanted to say, You were supposed to teach me how to read the words, but what would be the point of saying that, except to cause them more grief?
“We could preserve the bones, yes,” she said. “Is that all?”
“There is one more thing.”
“Tell me, then.”
“I want you to live.”
Air thickened in Mokoya’s lungs. “What?”
Rider’s hands wrapped gently around her arms as though she were an eggshell carving, fragile and precious. “I want you to embrace what fortune has bestowed upon you. I want you to look ahead with no regrets. I want you to carry the memory of what happened here into the future.”
Mokoya could not tamp down her reaction. “I can’t do that. I can’t pretend that it’s all okay—”
Rider sighed. “You blame yourself for this.”
“I know it’s foolish. I know I don’t shape the prophecies. I know things happen that I cannot change, but—”
They put a thin finger to her lips. “Hush. In another iteration of the world, we might never have met. It was fortune’s blessing that we did.”
“In another iteration of the world, you would live on.”
“Yet this is the one we have been given. We must make the best of it we can.”
Mokoya pressed her forehead to theirs and gasped her way through the torrent of emotions engulfing her. Their trembling fingers clung to the bones of her cheek and neck.
Rider’s breath ghosted over her lips. “Lie with me,” they whispered, brimming with heat. “Forget the world in my embrace. While we still can.”
“Yes.” She would have let Rider swallow her alive if they’d asked. There was nothing she would deny them. Not now.
Chapter Eighteen
MOKOYA STRUGGLED TO FIND sleep. Unease chewed at the corners of her consciousness, as though she had forgotten something, but could not remember what. Next to her Rider, exhausted and fragrant, had fallen into a pattern of deep and easy breaths. They’d spent hours describing life in the Quarterlands, telling of thousand-yield trees that took days to climb, of ringed dwellings that nestled in the canopies, of forest floors dark and unfathomable as the bottom of the ocean.
Mokoya had listened, their hands clasped between her own, trying to press every aspect of the scene into indelible memory. She had one advantage, Rider had said: this time, she already knew what the pattern of grief felt like. She would be prepared for what was to come.
Mokoya watched them sleep and tried to feel tenderness, but the unease was overwhelming, like a cramp in her fingers and toes. It drove her up, onto her feet, and out of the tent.
The sky was still dark. They had planned to set out perhaps an hour before next sunrise: the pugilists, the crew, a few of the Machinists. And Rider, of course.
Mokoya walked the tangled, sleeping intestines of the tent city until she came to its edge, where Bramble and Phoenix nested, quiet and unburdened. The oasis lapped gently at its borders. Mokoya rose onto the balls of her feet, five times, ten. It did not help.
She paced several circles
into the sand and then sat cross-legged in the middle of that track. She cleared her mind, blanked her mindeye, and tried to calm her uneasiness with the weight of the Slack.
The Slack is all, and all is the Slack.
Her recitation failed. Mokoya had always been a poor student of meditation, and her mind worked against her now, scraping against her skull. Everything she heard and felt was a distraction: blood surging in her veins, wind singing, oasis moistening the night air, the hot breaths of Phoenix and Bramble nearby.
Memories, images, impressions spiraled. Rider’s voice surfaced, saying, Since she did not feature in your prophecy, her fate is not yet locked.
Her fate is not yet locked. As if her visions caused the future, and not the other way around.
Why had Rider asked her if she folded the Slack to make her visions, as if she had control over the passage of time, over the twists and braids of fortune?
Mokoya reached for that folding trick again, trying to look at the Slack in a different way. She thought of the way Rider’s slackcrafting felt, intricate patterns generated from movement behind the curtains of what she knew. The Slack was not just divided into five natures—that was the Tensorate way of thinking—but infinitely malleable, not a layer over the world but an integral part of it, inseparable from the objects it governed, more all-encompassing than the First Sutra could have ever expressed.
She dissolved all her thoughts, dissolved her mindeye.
Yet it wasn’t enough. She had to do more than that.
Dissolve the trappings of Monastery training. Discard the frameworks of Tensor study.
Dissolve memory, dissolve personhood. She was no longer Mokoya, yet she remained unchanged. A collection of occurrences in space and time, mathematical possibilities intersecting and colliding, not a living thing but a coalescence of probabilities.
And then, as though lightning-struck, the thing that was once Sanao Mokoya saw it. That thing faced the Slack as the Quarterlanders must, raw and contiguous and endless.
The Slack is all, and all is the Slack.