The Red Threads of Fortune

by JY Yang

  “Or you could remain with me for the rest of the night.”

  Mokoya blinked. Rider leaned forward, and the closeness of their body, the heat of it mingling with her own, told her she hadn’t misunderstood their meaning. “I find you attractive,” Rider said, “and from your responses, I think you feel the attraction mutual. Why not lie with me?”

  She laughed. This wasn’t the first time she’d been so barefacedly propositioned, naturally. But she hadn’t expected this treatment out here, far from the fast-and-loose environs of red-lantern wine houses. And Rider had guessed right: Mokoya had been poorer at obscuring her base desires than she thought.

  Inexplicably, she shook her head. Among Adi’s crew she had gained a reputation for spending each night in a city in a different bed. And Thennjay had always urged her to take on more lovers, not fewer. She couldn’t articulate why she was refusing something so freely given.

  Rider sat back, reestablishing space between them. They seemed calm. “I apologize if I was too forward.”

  “You weren’t. I just—” She shivered, trying to put aside thoughts of Rider’s cool skin next to hers. “You saw my vision, didn’t you?”

  “I did, Mokoya.”

  “And you still want to get in bed with that?”

  Confusion worked through Rider’s face. Mokoya sighed and said, “Now’s not a good time.” She had no better explanation.

  “I understand. Wait here, then.” Again, that pop in the air, that sideways shift through the Slack. Rider transported across the cavern, their lithe form kneeling to search through the bags tied to Bramble’s harness. Mokoya had begun to understand that the intricate patterns of their slackcraft were not manually created, but generated from the processes that underlay the mysterious Quarterlandish style of tensing.

  Rider returned to her in a half crouch, one hand steadying themselves on Mokoya’s lap. With the other, they pressed a small, warm object into Mokoya’s hand.

  It was a bronze dodecahedron, hollow in the center, each of its twelve faces taking the form of a zodiac animal. Mokoya turned it round, marveling at the artistry in the stylized figures, the bright eyes, the pointed teeth.

  “It’s an anchor,” Rider said.

  “What does that mean? What does it anchor?”

  “I fold the Slack to travel, as you must have noticed.” Now Mokoya had a name for the process. “However, my control of the method is effective only at short distances. To travel to distant places, I must have an anchor in the place I wish to go. It ensures I do not materialize inside a wall, or outside a third-floor window.”

  Touching the anchor’s shape in the Slack stirred up dormant memories in the slow pulp of Mokoya’s mind. Honeylemon summer days, tender fruit slices dipped in sugar and chili. Some sort of spell woven into the body of the anchor, almost like a signature. Gooseflesh and pleasure played across her arms, a blush of warmth spreading red.

  A small smile tugged at Rider’s lips. “Are you certain you do not wish to stay?”

  Mokoya sighed and tucked the anchor into a waist pouch. She would not give in to temptation.

  Rider understood. “We will meet again soon, Mokoya.”

  * * *

  Mokoya managed to get halfway to camp before she changed her mind and turned around. She gave herself that much credit, at least.

  Rider was curled up on their sleeping mat, loosely swathed in a gossamer layer of muslin, when she returned. They sat up, blinking heavy lids. “Mokoya?”

  Mokoya stood silently by the bed, drinking in the long limbs with their slight musculature, the shape of their hips and breasts, the feast of strange characters that spread across their yoghurt complexion.

  Still saying nothing, she unfastened the collar of her cloak and pointedly, deliberately, began to undress.

  “Mokoya.” Rider watched intensely, a smile spreading along their lips, pomegranate-ripe and slow as salt. Wrapped in the gravity of their attention, Mokoya adjusted her movements into a calibrated dance.

  Rider reached up and pulled her into a closer orbit. “Mokoya,” they whispered, as her lips descended upon their neck. “Mokoya,” they repeated, as those lips continued their pilgrimage downward. Rider’s voice swelled with breath as Mokoya journeyed over the words on their skin, imagining those radicals spelling commandments, poetry, laws of the universe. Mokoya. Mokoya. The world outside faded away. Mokoya closed her eyes and let herself sink into bliss, her mind utterly blank except for those three syllables, tumbling over and over again from Rider’s lips.

  Chapter Six

  MOKOYA WOKE to the day’s first sunrise warming the cavern, casting waterfall light on the far wall. Bramble and Phoenix were quiescent in the corner, a gentle heap of snouts tucked into tails, rib cages rising and falling.

  Rider, too, remained in the drifts of sleep, curled against Mokoya’s shoulder, loops of hair loose around their face. Peace sat languid and unfamiliar in her chest: not the peace of familiar comforts, of old beddings and well-worn grooves in stone, but a clear kind of peace, like an ocean with stones at the bottom, its surface jade-blue and throwing off sunlight.

  Mokoya studied Rider’s features, puzzled by the emotions that filled her. She was used to slipping from between the thighs of people for whom names and faces were mere formalities, soon to be forgotten. Yet here she was, imagining futures with this person whose history and mind were gray blanks to her. But what bright futures they were! Days spent hunting, nights spent entwined like this. She was not too old and broken to be snagged on the dangerous barbs of hope.

  You idiot. You chicken-headed idiot.

  Rider stirred as if they could hear her thoughts. Mokoya, they mouthed, as if still testing her name on their tongue.

  “Did you rest well?” she asked.

  “A little too well.” In the quiet, Rider traced the pebbled ridges on her right arm, fingers dancing on the border where lizard skin lapped at the brown twists of scar tissue. The arm was a rich crimson now, a wild and prosperous shade Mokoya had rarely displayed since she’d gotten the graft. “The colors change. Do they mean anything?”

  “They’re controlled by my mood. The doctors took the graft from a blue horned lizard, which uses colors to communicate. Blue is neutral. Green is for sadness, yellow and orange for stress. Black for anger.”

  “Then what about red?”

  “What do you think?”

  They smiled.

  Mokoya had questions of her own. “Tell me about these markings,” she said, tracing a line of them down Rider’s arm. Up close, in the light, she recognized the characters as old Kuanjin script, shapes of a dead language known only to obscure scholars. “Why do you have them?”

  Rider pressed their face into her chest and mumbled, “They are a record. They tell the story of my life, the things I want remembered.”

  “Where did you learn to read them?”

  “There are caves in the Quarterlands, deep beneath the skin of the earth, where the walls are covered with thousands upon thousands of these characters. They tell you their names if you ask.”

  Mokoya shivered, to which Rider said, “I could teach you. The language is not so difficult, especially for a speaker of modern-day Kuanjinwei.”

  She traced the character strokes printed at the apex of their shoulder. Something stirred under her finger, a phantom flutter of tiny wings. “These aren’t ordinary tattoos, are they?”

  “No. They are tensed into my skin, into my flesh. I made them so they will burn into my bones upon my death.”

  “You do these yourself?”

  “Of course.” They detached from her, rolling onto their back. “I spend many of my days alone, Mokoya. If something happens . . . I do not want my existence to go unremarked upon. I do not want to be an anonymous set of bones scattered in the desert, chanced upon by travelers and discarded.”

  A springtime of questions flowered in Mokoya’s head, and she imagined picking them off one after another, in some version of the future with long, balmy ho
urs for sleep. She imagined comfortable days spent learning new languages, words passing from tongue to tongue.

  She stretched. “I have a question.”

  “What question?”

  “When you gave me the anchor yesterday, you said you fold the Slack.”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you explain that?” How did one fold something that had no shape, no beginning and no end?

  “The Slack knows neither time nor space—it is all that ever was and all that ever will be, connected together. If you bring one point to another, you can travel between them.”

  “I don’t understand.” It was like imagining a color invisible to human eyes.

  “My time in Chengbee taught me that the way I see the Slack is different from a Tensor’s conception of it, Mokoya. Your confusion surprises me, however. Do you not fold the Slack when you seek your visions?”

  “No, they come to me unbidden. There’s no folding involved, no tensing. It happens when it happens.”

  “So you have no control over the process?”

  “No.”

  Rider looked at the cavern roof, considering this piece of information. Then they rose to their feet. “Come. I can show you.”

  They both got dressed and stood in the middle of the cavern.

  “Close your eyes,” Rider said.

  Mokoya cleared her mindeye, and they both became radiant spots against the fabric of the world.

  Rider took her hands and tensed.

  The world shuddered, sudden and seismic, like the ground was a cloth that had been snatched away. The sound of water washed over her as the air embraced her with cool damp. Droplets flecked her skin. She opened her eyes next to the cascade of oasis water, Rider shimmering before her in the new light.

  “Did you feel that?” Rider asked.

  “Do it again.”

  This time, she watched the Slack as it moved. Not just the simple motion of tensing, pulling on threads and connections. A wholesale shift. She’d never experienced anything like it.

  Rider’s voice echoed through the cavern: “Your turn now.”

  Mokoya blinked. “That’s a little—”

  “You must try. You have the capability.”

  Mokoya closed her eyes again. She cleansed her mindeye, recited the First Sutra—

  “Forget everything you have learned. It will not help you.”

  She hissed in annoyance, her focus broken.

  Outside the caverns, in the desert, someone shouted her name. Again and again, the sound echoing back and forth. Searching for her. Desperate.

  They stared at each other. “Thennjay,” Mokoya said. “Something’s wrong.” She broke into a run, headed for the boundary between cavern and passageway. “Thenn! It’s me, I’m in here!”

  The whirr of lightcraft tumbled toward her. Whatever momentary peace Mokoya had found was drowned by an acid-sharp flood of adrenaline, thick and frothy in her throat and chest.

  Thennjay arrived like an avalanche, presence filling the chamber, gaze sweeping across the scene. “Oh, great.”

  “What is it?” Mokoya asked. His pinched expression said many things, none of them good.

  “Your enjoyable night aside, this day has just taken a massively hell-shat turn—”

  “Thenn.”

  He shut his eyes and forced calmness over his face. “The naga we’re hunting? The big one? We found it.”

  The breath he drew should have warned her what was coming, because it was shaky, and she’d rarely seen him shake. “Nao, it’s the size of the sun. And it’s attacking Bataanar.”

  ACT TWO

  BATAANAR

  Chapter Seven

  MOKOYA HAD BEEN DRILLED in basic Slack theory at the Grand Monastery by Master Chong, a tall and hard man, with long steps and a seismic voice that carried across the classroom. Decades later, she could still close her eyes and recall its heavy boom, accompanied by a high chorus of summer crickets.

  “The nature of objects is fixed and known. That bucket is red; wood is consumed by fire; ice floats upon water.” He strode across the room like he owned it. “Pity the object, for it is trapped in its circumstances. Water can no more freeze in high summer than the sun can decide to stop falling across the sky.”

  One of the acolytes had snickered. Master Chong had rapped her across the head with his knuckles, cutting her mirth short. His voice had rung out: “Listen carefully, you dogs! Today you learn to break the chains of circumstance. For the masters of the five natures know that the Slack is ever in motion. And through the natures of the Slack, we can change the nature of objects.”

  Through the natures of the Slack, we can change the nature of objects. That hot afternoon each acolyte sat, sweat beading, as glasses of water refused to turn into ice, and the walls and floor of the pavilion, warm as a sibling’s embrace, mocked their efforts.

  Those childhood lessons felt both incalculably distant and intimately close as Phoenix cut full-tilt through the wind, her narrow head lowered, each massive footstep cracking across fresh ice. Mokoya could barely pull the fire from the waters of the oasis fast enough to freeze a pathway beneath them.

  If Mokoya had been paying any attention to the math, it would have looked something like this:

  Force is mass times acceleration; pressure is force divided by surface area. The load-bearing capacity of ice is a factor of the square of its thickness. A running creature of Phoenix’s weight requires a yield of solid ice beneath for support. Volume is length times breadth times height. Two li from the caverns to Bataanar, spanned by a path a yield wide. Ten thousand cubic yields of water to freeze.

  But none of that was on her mind. In the window of extreme focus that had opened and swallowed her, all thought was a distraction, a background hum to her actions. Her mindeye superseded her physical senses, the world surrendering to the shimmer of the Slack. Thennjay, mounted on his lightcraft, was a pinprick on the horizon. Behind him, Rider decorated the Slack with polygonal patterns as they pushed Bramble against the wind. Phoenix was falling behind.

  Light and pressure exploded hundreds of yields away, as though a volcano had woken into violent enlightenment. Bataanar.

  Mokoya’s eyes snapped open, and fear slammed into her. On the horizon, wavering like a mirage, Bataanar was wreathed in a fiery dome. But it wasn’t burning down. The light came from the city’s thermal shields, defending it from the creature attacking it.

  The naga dwarfed Bramble in size, eclipsing her five to six times over, in a way that rendered math irrelevant. Bloodred clamored against poison-black on its skin. Its spread wings, clawing into the shields, obscured half the city from sight.

  The naga screeched, a sound like metal tearing, like gods dying. It pressed its wings into the shields and struck with its hind legs as if it would disembowel the city itself.

  How was the naga still alive? How had the shields not burned it to death?

  Cracks appeared in the shields, a foul radiance as intense as death. Thermal shields were powerful and complex, setting aflame anything that crossed their threshold. Only Tensors could charge one or hold one against prolonged attack. Bataanar was a working people’s city, a blood-and-sweat city, and its reluctant handful of Tensors were better suited to maintaining and charging mining equipment.

  Where were the pugilists? Where was her brother? Would they be able to hold it off?

  Mokoya’s heartbeat made her dizzy. Phoenix could run no faster. She could not fly. They weren’t going to make it.

  What had Rider said? The Slack knows neither time nor space. . . . If you bring one point to another, you can travel between them.

  Back in the cavern, she had felt the Slack twist like a child’s napkin, sliding away under her.

  She returned to the mindeye. The heaving struggle between shield and naga deformed the Slack, tearing a fault line into its fabric. The conflagration looked close enough to touch, but it wasn’t. If she could abridge the space between them—

  It shouldn’t be possib
le, and yet—

  It was like watching a pattern appear out of cloud. The geography of the Slack changed around Mokoya. Everything was still the same, yet the way she saw it had shifted, and if she just pulled it this way—

  The Slack folded.

  Ice turned to sand under Phoenix. The raptor shrieked as her legs buckled under her, balance lost. Sky and ground lurched. Then came pain: a solid mass of land slamming into Mokoya’s head and shoulder and hips. Sand invaded her airways.

  Mokoya struggled upright, coughing and spitting. Phoenix was likewise climbing to her feet. The smell of molten metal burned on the air—death smell, industrial-kiln smell. Her clumsy Slack folding had ejected them onto a narrow strip of sand between the oasis and Bataanar. Where the oasis narrowed to a pucker and kissed the side of the city, dozens of boats waited to take workers to the mines. The naga cast a shadow over it all.

  The pugilists on their lightcraft were no more than a cloud of mosquitoes, irritating the naga’s skin with their tiny lightning bolts. Mokoya saw Adi and the crew huddled limply in the shelter of the oasis inlet.

  The naga screamed again. This close to the city, the sound pierced the eardrums like a spear.

  Mokoya reached for earth-nature and tensed, hard as she could. Gravity warped, pulling at the naga’s massive bulk.

  Mokoya felt the naga tense back, and in a moment of shock, she let go. A creature that used slackcraft. Impossible.

  Like a cart struck by a falling tree, Bataanar’s shields failed.

  First principles: water-nature keeps things going in motion. As the shield exploded, the naga fell forward, bellowing and beating its massive wings to keep afloat. The displaced air knocked Mokoya off her feet. A wing and a hind leg caught watchtowers in their path, shattering the fortifications into loose masonry that pummeled the ground.

  Lying on her back, Mokoya watched a single figure, clad in black, leap onto the ruins of the city walls. Akeha. Her twin might disguise himself from others, but she would always know him. He raised a hand, something clutched in it. She felt its pull and knew what it was. “Great Slack, don’t—”