The Black Tides of Heaven

by JY Yang

  “A hundred, more, I’m not sure. A lot. They have weapons.”

  “They’re here for me,” Akeha said.

  Thennjay shot him a look, and Akeha knew he was going to confront Mother’s troops alone, to pretend that he wasn’t harboring a dangerous fugitive. “Stay here.”

  “Thenn—”

  “Please. Stay with Mokoya. Watch her.”

  He watched Thennjay leave, broad-backed and determined. A sour tide of emotion crested and spent itself within him, nervous energy trickling down to his fingers, his calves, his feet. There were many ways this could end, none of them happy. Akeha had to do something, and only a narrow band of choices were left to him.

  He looked at Yongcheow, as if to say, This is what I was afraid of. This is why I could never return.

  Yongcheow’s lips charted a grim line. He knew Akeha too well. He understood what was going to happen.

  One of the doctors tending to Mokoya was significantly older than the other, her eyes lined with age, if not wisdom. Akeha looked at her. “You need lung tissue,” he said. “How long will it take to extract it?”

  The woman sighed. “It’s a delicate procedure. First, the donor has to be sedated—”

  “How long.”

  “Hours, at least.”

  Hours they did not have, not now. He stroked Mokoya’s forehead, neatening the line of her hair over her cold skin.

  He looked at the old doctor. “Can you harvest the tissue from a dead body?”

  “Akeha,” Yongcheow whispered.

  She blinked, visibly swallowing. “I—we—yes, but it has to be relatively soon after death.”

  “How soon?”

  The doctor shook her head; she understood the thrust of Akeha’s questioning. “Sir, I cannot—”

  “Just tell me,” Akeha said. He tried to be gentle.

  She could not meet his eyes. “I would guess within three hours of death, if not sooner.”

  Half a sun-cycle. A narrow band, but not unreasonable. “Thank you,” he said.

  “You can’t,” Yongcheow said, preempting his argument entirely. “I won’t let you.”

  He wanted to say, You should have stayed away if you didn’t want to see this. Instead he cupped Yongcheow’s chin. “We got this far. It’s more than I could have asked for.”

  “If you die, your sister dies too. You know that. Your mother won’t allow otherwise.”

  We were born together; we die together. “Mokoya would never let the movement be sacrificed for her sake. Neither will I.”

  A stubborn set of the lip. “I’ll go with you.”

  “Mother will have you killed. Her only interest is in me. If you come along, she’ll use you against me.”

  “I can’t just let you go.”

  “You have to.”

  Yongcheow gripped his arms hard, as if he could prevent Akeha leaving through sheer physical force. “Yongcheow, I want you to stay here. Look after Thennjay. And Mokoya, if the Almighty permits.” If a miracle happens. “Do this for me.”

  Yongcheow mouthed the syllables of his name, unable to put strength behind them. Akeha kissed him hard, their lips issuing a commandment of desire, playing a symphony of desperation.

  When their bodies parted, it felt like a continent splitting. He gripped Yongcheow’s hand, then put his hand over his heart. “His peace be with you,” he said.

  Then he leaned over Mokoya and pressed his lips to her forehead. He whispered words he should have said years ago, instead of leaving it until now, when there was a good chance she wasn’t hearing them at all, her eyes dark and swollen shut. He had to go. He had to go. He pretended he wasn’t shaking as he walked away.

  * * *

  Eyes trailed Akeha’s pilgrimage to the front of the monastery: acolytes and senior pugilists and everyone in between, peering from windows and behind pillars. The ranks of the pious had been swelled with Thennjay’s Machinist refugees, protected thus far by the ancient codes that granted the Grand Monastery autonomy over its affairs. If they weren’t on a list before they fled here, they were safe from Mother’s grasp.

  Until now.

  This was how the raids always started, soldiers banging on doors suspected to conceal known Machinists. Next it would be a line of people squatting against the wall, heads down, hands tied behind their backs, soon to be sucked into the fetid underbelly of the Protectorate. Vanished. So great was the appetite of empire that it would not even spit out the bones.

  He would not let that happen here.

  Akeha came to the cushion of garden between the monastery and the path to the city. Thennjay was locked in verbal hostility with a woman dressed in a general’s colors. Arrayed on the steps below them were hundreds of soldiers, guns in hand. One of them scratched an itchy calf, another shifted on restless feet. Their impatience pinged on the Slack, a constellation of microtwitches.

  Akeha stepped forward. “Thennjay.”

  The man turned, an oceanic wash of fear and dismay overcoming him. “Leave them alone,” Akeha said to the pinch-faced general. “I’ll come with you. I want to speak to my mother.”

  Thennjay rumbled. “Akeha—”

  “Don’t.” He looked over the columns of waiting Protectorate troops. “Don’t get innocents killed protecting me.”

  He had been running from this for long enough. It was time to put it to an end.

  Akeha pulled Thennjay close and kissed him, for old times’ sake. Thennjay whispered his name once, but he let go of Akeha’s hand, let him leave with the troops. What choice did he have?

  Chapter Twenty-two

  THE SKY TURNED GRAY and heavy as they climbed the eight hundred steps to the Great High Palace, as though the heavenly host had amassed to bear witness. Akeha had spent the journey to the palace coming to a decision and making peace with it. He realized now that there was a reason he’d returned to the city today, and not any time before. His heart and veins were ice, and his mind was clear. He knew what he had to do.

  The Protector met him in an open-air courtyard just off the main audience chamber. Akeha, trailing in the general’s stiff-legged wake, was presented with a silent, heavily robed figure, hands folded behind her, gazing out at the white sprawl of the Great High Palace and the smoky tangle of Chengbee below.

  “Protector, I have brought you the boy,” the general said.

  “Leave us,” his mother said, without turning around.

  “Yes, Protector.” The general bowed and left.

  The Protector continued studying the vista of her dominion, letting silence uncoil between them. Akeha was not intimidated. He scanned the courtyard for threats, his mindeye bright and open. Before him, his mother was a furnace in the Slack, a smear of light that was almost painful to focus on. They were truly alone.

  She had let him come with weapons intact. All the knives tucked in easy corners. All the contents of his pockets. Hubris on her part, or foolishness? It did not matter.

  “The sun falls and returns five times a day, the flowers wilt and return once a year. But the return of a wayward child is something that happens once a lifetime.” The Protector turned around and took swaying, deliberate steps toward Akeha. “And here you are. Let me have a look at you.”

  The years had treated his mother well. Akeha, like everyone else, was not privy to her real age. She was supposed to have been in her fifties when the twins were born, which would put her in her eighties now. She didn’t look it. She looked so much like Mokoya, big glassy eyes set in a broad, sharply contoured face.

  It had been years since he’d stood in her presence. In that time, his life had been deformed around her and her actions. He had run from her troops. He had killed and watched others be killed. He had held the hands of dying friends, delivered bad news to grieving spouses and parents. He had seen families torn apart, watched the elderly starve, held children with all hope ripped from them.

  And here she stood, radiant and triumphant, oblivious to the suffering that collected in the long shadow of
her Protectorate. If his anger were poison, she would have been long dead.

  The Protector clapped her hands to Akeha’s face, her face crinkling in a smile of unverifiable sincerity. “See that. What a fine young man you have grown into.”

  He pulled his lips into a smile. “And I suppose you’ll tell me how proud you are.”

  “Does it surprise you? There is greatness in your blood that cannot be denied.”

  Should he mock her for taking credit for his successes? No, that would just play into her game. “I’m not here for a warmhearted family reunion. Tell me what you want, or let me go.”

  The smile stayed on her face. “And of course, rude and ungrateful. As I have come to expect of you.” She glided away, at ease in her seat of power. “All these years . . . did you think I knew nothing of what you have been doing? You and your sister both, with your charming little rebellion. All of which I indulged. I thought, why spoil the children’s fun? But perhaps I have gone one step too far.”

  When she turned back, her smile had evaporated. “Very well. If you insist on acting like a grasping merchant, then let us lay out the terms of your surrender.”

  He indulged her: “What do you want?”

  “Lady Han.”

  Akeha scoffed. “Do you imagine that I could go out, capture her, and bring her back tied in a red silk ribbon?”

  “And give Mikara that sort of pleasure?” She blinked, like a crocodile. “Of course it won’t be something so crude. You should know better that that, Akeha. Our arrangement will work this way. I will let you go. You may return to your sister and your little friends. Within you, implanted under your skin, will be a device developed by my Tensors that will send information back to us. It’s simple enough. You don’t even have to do anything.”

  Akeha pretended to think about it. Then he said, “No.”

  “No? Simply that?”

  He nodded. “No.”

  “Ah.” She laughed. “You haven’t been in the capital for many years, Akeha. You think I’m giving you a choice.”

  He shrugged. “I’m making a choice.”

  “Your choice is between leaving the palace alive, and not.”

  “Accepting death is also a choice.”

  The Protector’s face creased in mock concern. “Oh, but your sister’s also dying, isn’t she? Sonami tells me she needs a lung graft to survive. Who will be the donor if you die, I wonder?”

  Sonami. The sudden mention of her name came like a blow through the chest. Wasn’t she supposed to be on their side?

  He supposed it didn’t matter.

  “Would you truly sacrifice Mokoya as well?” she asked.

  It was pathetic how little she knew of those she called her children. What they wanted. What they would choose.

  Akeha turned away from her as though deep in thought. As though seriously considering her proposal. As he turned, he put his hand in his pocket, fingers brushing the cool petals of Eien’s last gift to him. A gangrenous smile spread across his face. “You should have killed me when you could.”

  “Oh?” The Protector sounded amused. So much hubris. “And when should that have been?”

  He laughed, a low sound. “You should have strangled me in the crib. The spare child, wasn’t I? You should have gotten rid of me.”

  His fingers, burrowing deeper, closed around cold metal. A plum-sized metal sphere. “But you didn’t. You let me grow up. You sowed the seeds of your own downfall. It’s what you deserve.”

  He turned around, the sunball gleaming in his hand. His mother’s eyes widened. “Is that . . .”

  “Checkmate,” he said.

  He didn’t have to do it right. Just enough to set it off.

  Akeha tensed.

  In his hand the sunball flared to life. He hurled it forward, eyes closed, ready for his bones to dissolve in a blessing of heat and light.

  The Slack contracted. The blow was so powerful he was flung off his feet. Was this what it was like to die?

  And yet Akeha hit ground intact enough for it to hurt, muscle and tendon crying out at the impact of solid upon solid. The Slack flared nova-white, immense energy canceled out by immense energy.

  His mother had countered the sunball.

  Akeha leapt to his feet. The Protector lay crumpled a few yields away, an unmoving mound of silk and brocade. Was she dead? Had she sacrificed herself for him?

  He moved toward her without thinking, bringing a knife to her throat. Not dead: his mother lay stunned, drained by her monumental expenditure of slackcraft. She looked up at him, pink-eyed, breathing shallowly, as his blade pressed into her skin.

  He could just kill her. He should. Slit her throat and end this particular problem here and now. The flensing edge bit into her flesh. Blood welled up, bright against the metal.

  She stared silently at him, a smile playing at her lips. Calm, almost proud.

  Fury rampaged through him. He wanted her to say something. Anything. Insult him, plead with him, tell him she loved him. Explain why she’d protected both of them, instead of throwing the protective shield only around herself. Anything.

  His hands shook. Red smeared over the edge of the metal.

  He’d spent nearly twenty years running from her. He’d spent his entire life orbiting around her and his idea of her, distant as another galaxy. Even now, when he had her at the mercy of his blade, he wanted her to tell him what she was thinking, what she thought of him. She still had this power over him.

  And then he knew. If he did the logical thing and pushed the knife all the way through her throat, if he stood by and watched while her blood emptied onto the gray flagstones and her pupils dilated into senselessness, if he gave in to his basest desires and slaughtered her right there—he could never leave. He would be trapped there forever, standing over his mother’s dead body, his life from now on defined by this moment.

  She would always own him. He would never be free.

  There was always a choice.

  Akeha straightened up. Her curious eyes followed him.

  “I held your life in my hands,” he said, his voice loud and cold as ringing metal. “I could have killed you. Your fate belonged to me.” He dropped the knife; it sang against the ground. “I choose to spare you. I release my hold over you.”

  He stepped backward, putting space between them. The Protector sat up slowly, a thin line of blood marking her neck. His mother said nothing. What did the look on her face mean? Was she confused, angry, happy? Did she think he was a fool or a hero? He couldn’t tell. He couldn’t read her expression. Perhaps he never could.

  He said, “Now I turn my back, and I walk away. Whatever you do next is your choice. It will be your choice alone.”

  Akeha turned his back on his mother and began to walk.

  He walked across the courtyard. Across its border and down the corridors where he had grown up. Any moment, he expected the claws of death to strike: a knife in the back, an arrow through the chest, the unbreakable grip of palace guards. Anything. Here were the ponds where he and Mokoya had spent afternoons chasing fish. There was the obelisk before which he first understood himself. With every minute, a different diorama from his past slid by, a reprise of all the opening gambits before the final moves were played. Any moment now.

  Yet death still did not come. He was crossing the outer pavilions, one step after another, heading forward. There was the threshold of the Great High Palace; there were the endless stairs that would lead him away from all this. He did not slow down. He did not look back. He put one foot in front of the other, a lone figure traversing the wide spaces that had once defined him. It had begun to rain, the gray skies finally shedding their load. The drops pelted him, warm and thick on his face. He tasted air full of earth and sky. Below him Chengbee waited, growing and breathing and alive.

  Akeha walked and walked and walked.

  EPILOGUE

  IT WAS ONE WEEK, ten long days, before Mokoya allowed Akeha to see her. Thennjay found him meditating in the cour
tyard and said, “If you want to talk, I think she might say something now.” She hadn’t asked for him specifically, but there had been a softening in the baffling wall of thorns she’d woven around herself after she woke.

  The first thing he heard was a rhythmic smacking sound, like a butcher tenderizing meat in a market square. Mokoya stood in the exercise yard, her back to him, repeatedly punching something that hung from a tree.

  He approached her slowly. Her tunic had the sleeves cut off, exposing the fact that her right arm was now red and blue. Not the colors of beaten flesh, but of plumage and blossom, rich and deep. As Akeha drew closer, the lizard grain of the skin became apparent, supple and hairless, ridges of keratin rising and swirling down the rippling flesh.

  Mokoya punched the flour bag with the lizard arm—five times, six—then shook it out like a child with pins and needles.

  “Moko,” he said.

  She turned around. Saw him. Surprise, shock, then a carousel of unidentifiable emotions. A mass of scars crawled up the right side of her face, ropy and discolored.

  She turned back to the flour bag without saying a word and started punching it again.

  Akeha stood, waiting, while she struck out her anger, her grief, her frustration. Whatever demons clutched her in their grip. This was the Mokoya he remembered, full of emotion and impulse, always on her feet, always trying to think of something. On the streets of Jixiang and Cinta Putri and Bunshim, with the gulf of lakes and rivers between them, it had been so easy to turn her into this mythical figure, a distant and all-powerful entity insulated by the walls of the capital and the monastery. A prophet. The prophet. Beloved and abstract.

  But she was also his sister. A mortal, a human being, a person. Made of flesh and sinew and bone and blood. And she could be hurt like anyone else.

  Finally she let her arm hang loose, breathing hard. She didn’t turn around. “I’m sorry I wasted your time.”

  “What do you mean? You didn’t.”

  She cracked her knuckles. “You came because I was dying. You wanted to say good-bye, didn’t you?” She started hitting the flour bag again, punctuating each word with a painful slapping sound. “But I didn’t die.” Smack. Smack. “So you made the trip here for nothing.”