The Red Threads of Fortune

by JY Yang

  Akeha hurled it.

  Cheebye.

  Akeha called them sunballs, but his contraptions were anything but benign givers of light. When her brother made sunballs, he made superweapons. Enclosed in that shell was a minuscule amount of burning gas, invisible to the eye, tensed into so much heat and pressure that the atoms melted, succumbed to one another, and changed their nature. Akeha was working massive amounts of earth-energy, condensed around that single, infinitesimally small point—

  Mokoya shielded her face—

  He let go.

  The explosion hammered through her bones. Something huge fell into the water, a seismic sound, a deep groaning. Acridity flared into her lungs. Keha, you turtle egg.

  Mokoya’s vision cleared in time for Bramble’s wings to interrupt the sky. The smaller naga’s legs were knives scything into the back of the fallen behemoth as it thrashed in the oasis. The larger naga reared its massive head and slammed into Bramble with one sinuous ripple of the neck. She fell with a desperate, wounded-animal sound.

  The grand naga surged into the sky. Tsunami-height waves sent the boats on the inlet crashing into each other, the sound of skeletons being shaken. The beat of its wings flattened sand and shrub in its passage. It headed east. Of course. The segment of desert they hadn’t searched yet.

  Bramble struggled across the inlet, unable to take to the air. A forlorn figure rested on her back: Rider, slumped in exhaustion. Mokoya’s heart contracted painfully as they slid from the harness and crumpled onto the sand.

  Mokoya’s hip and back reported pain with every stride. Still she ran. Her mind conjured visions of Rider dead, blood emptying onto the hot ground, tattoos flaring red as they burned through their skin.

  And then they moved, rising slowly to their feet, taking a step toward her, before folding in two again. In relief, Mokoya closed the distance between them and pulled Rider into her embrace. Their heartbeat stuttered in their neck, in their chest. “Mokoya,” they whispered.

  “Rest,” Mokoya said. “You’ll be all right. Thank the fortunes.”

  “It is as I feared,” they said, barely coherent, barely conscious. “This creature . . . what it means. . . .” Their limbs trembled, and they went limp.

  “Rider!” Their weight pulled Mokoya to the fevered, disturbed ground. Rider was pale and clammy, a flickering imprint in the Slack. Mokoya’s graceless tensing through forest-nature told her nothing. The workings of the body, its branches and its energy flows, had always been opaque to her.

  A lightcraft approached as Mokoya tracked the precarious contractions of Rider’s heart. One-two, one-two, one-two. Her arms were shaking, her vision eaten by sparks of lightning.

  “Nao?” She looked up. Thennjay was warm and solid against the dizzy, swallowing sky. She couldn’t read his face, but she could read the alarm in his voice. “What have we gotten into, Nao?”

  Mokoya pressed Rider to her bosom. She had no words for him.

  Chapter Eight

  LIKE MOSS, LIFE SPILLED outward from Bataanar in the form of a hundred tents and caravans, where brown-toothed merchants and transients and others who couldn’t find space within the tightly regulated city walls made camp and fought for scraps of whatever—food, trade, love—came their way.

  It was here that Thennjay and his pugilists had unfurled their tents, choosing to put down their roots among the poor. The caravan city had escaped the brunt of the naga’s attacks, and in one of the tents, Thennjay leaned over Rider’s unconscious form, hands gentle on the pale damp of their forehead, working quietly through forest-nature.

  Mokoya watched him while worrying at the bones of her hands, a thousand half-formed sentences swarming in her mind, drowning out all logical thought. Fragments of the past day tumbled loose in vivid flashes: The gray fabric of Rider’s bed. The shadow of basalt outcrops in the desert. The explosion scars on Bataanar’s walls, like black peonies. The sickening smell of burning flesh and oil—

  No. That was a set of smells—and thoughts—from another time.

  Thennjay stood. Through the ringing in her ears, Mokoya asked, “Well?”

  His first answer skated past her in a collection of syllables that did not register as words. She blinked and forced herself to focus on the present. “What?”

  With a gentle, patient air, Thennjay repeated, “No internal bleeding, no serious injuries. Just exhaustion. She’ll recover.”

  “They.”

  “They,” Thennjay acknowledged. He brushed fingers along the scars embroidering her face. “How about you?”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  He tilted his head. “All right.” He had long years of experience, and he knew when it was futile to argue with Mokoya. He looked over at Rider. “Who are they?”

  Mokoya told him what she knew. Her explanation, condensed to six sentences, sounded flimsy and inadequate. “That’s all,” she said at the end of it. “We’ve only just met.”

  “You like them,” he said.

  “I bedded them. It doesn’t mean anything.”

  “You like them,” he repeated, one corner of his lips lifting.

  “Stop. I’m not that easy to read.”

  “Oh, my love.” Thennjay laughed and caressed her cheek again. “You haven’t changed.”

  She smiled back, then looked away. Beyond the cool dim flaps of the tent, a chorus of voices brawled and overlapped, but in here peace reigned. She felt herself settling in the present, her senses behaving better, her mind returning to roost.

  The tent flaps rustled, and a stout, frowning entity pushed its way through. Adi. “Ah, you.”

  Patches of soot and rusty blood stained Adi’s clothes. A thick, dark clot clung to her brow, but she waved off Thennjay’s attempts to have a look. “Your friend’s naga we tied outside with Phoenix,” she said to Mokoya.

  “Good. She’s tame. She’ll give you no trouble.”

  “Sure or not. She already tried to bite off Faizal’s head.”

  “I don’t blame her; sometimes I feel the same way.”

  Adi snorted, but her mirth was shallow. She shook her head. “Mokoya,” she said, “we didn’t sign up for this nonsense.”

  “I know. Adi, I won’t blame you if you decide to go. I can’t keep everyone safe.”

  “You see outside like that, how to go?” Adi let out a huge huff and planted her fists on her hips. “But you don’t expect me to help with your politics.”

  “No. Of course not.” As Adi turned to leave, she said, “Adi—thank you.”

  Adi ruched her nose. “You thank me for what.” And then she was gone.

  “I love her,” Thennjay said, in the space left by her departure.

  It was just the two of them now, if you didn’t count Rider. Adi’s brief encroachment had brought back the gravity of the situation and the depth of the uncertainty they were mired in. Mokoya said, “What do you know about Tan Khimyan, the raja’s advisor? What did Akeha tell you?”

  “About her?” Thennjay shrugged. “Nothing, except that she interferes with all his plans, and he would like to acquaint her with a pit of vipers. You know how he is.”

  That didn’t help Mokoya assemble a mental image of the woman, so she simply substituted the blank in her mind with a clone of her mother, equipped with the same face, the same mannerisms, and the same motivations. “She wants to destroy Bataanar. We have to stop her.”

  “Do we know that?” Thennjay drew in a huge breath, rotating his shoulders. “I’m not convinced she’s controlling the naga. You saw it too. I don’t know if that beast can be controlled.”

  Mokoya folded her arms. “That naga used slackcraft. You felt it, didn’t you?” When Thennjay nodded reluctantly, she pressed on: “Animals don’t become adepts—they’re in no way complex enough. Something’s been done to that naga. And that means whoever’s experimented on it also developed a way of controlling it.” She was definitely thinking of her mother now. “They wouldn’t make a weapon they can’t leash.”

  “Oka
y,” Thennjay said. “Fair. But what if it’s gone rogue?”

  “Then we’re not any less dead, are we?”

  Thennjay shut his eyes, put his hands over his face, and sucked air through the gaps.

  A familiar presence drew near, emerging from the swamp of activity around the tent. A narrow blade of focused purpose. She knew who it was before he came through the flaps. “Keha.”

  Sanao Akeha entered the tent with a frown, which was his default expression. The captain of Bataanar’s city guard scanned the tiny, canvas-bound space, and the frown dissolved as he caught sight of his sister. “Moko. Thank the Almighty.”

  He crushed her in a hug, which she returned. Her twin stank of grease and dust and wood char, but he was alive and unhurt. She let go of the last dregs of resentment.

  “I didn’t get a hug,” Thennjay grumbled.

  Akeha remained unimpressed. “You didn’t wipe her snot when she was six. Deal with it.”

  Mokoya elbowed Akeha in the chest, and he grunted. His gaze fell upon Rider’s form on the bed. “Who’s that?”

  “A friend,” Mokoya said, in the same moment Thennjay said, “Mokoya’s new lover.”

  Akeha looked from one to the other. “All right.” She saw him dismiss Rider as unimportant, a small but distracting pattern in one corner of a larger tapestry, and wanted to protest: Wait, not so fast.

  But Thennjay was already moving the conversation onward. “Where’s Yongcheow?”

  “In the city. Trying to get Lady Han on the talker. Everything’s gone to pieces around here.” Akeha looked hollowed out. With proximity, Mokoya noticed how his hair hung in tangled clumps around his chin. Was that blood? She reached for it, and he batted her hand away.

  Thennjay said, “We were discussing the naga before you arrived. We thought it might be under someone’s control.”

  “That’s wonderful. We’ve got bigger problems,” Akeha said.

  Mokoya squinted at him. “Bigger problems than that naga?”

  His lips formed a grim line. “The raja has sent for Protectorate troops.”

  “That fool.” The words burst explosively from Thennjay. “After Bengang Baru? Did he learn nothing?”

  Mokoya remembered Bengang Baru: a sleepy fishing town with a small pewter factory, population five thousand. Unremarkable until it had accrued an unhealthy reputation as a Machinist hub. Officially, it had been flattened by a Machinist experiment gone wrong. But Mokoya had walked through the cratered, smoking streets, still hot and glowing with the bones of fisherfolk and the timbers of factory workers’ houses, and she had seen the hand of the Protectorate everywhere. In the traces of slackcraft lingering still in the fire. In the wounds left in buildings by Protectorate guns. In the utter, ruthless devastation that was her mother’s signature. No one had been left alive to tell the truth.

  “You know Mother’s just waiting for an excuse,” Mokoya said. Protectorate troops would come not to defend, but to destroy. How could the raja be so stupid?

  “His advisor has been trying to manufacture crises in the city for months now,” Akeha growled. “Now she’s finally got what she wanted.”

  “She’s the one controlling the naga,” Mokoya said. “I’m certain of that now.” A narrative had lodged in the tracks of her mind. Tan Khimyan, disgraced Tensor, exiled to the wilds of Ea, seeking a way back to the capital. Decides to curry favor with the Protector by sacrificing a city—a Machinist base, after all, had to be destroyed, never mind the thousands who lived in it.

  It was what Mother would do.

  “We must ask him to rescind the call for aid,” Thennjay said.

  Akeha scowled. “Can you recall an arrow that has been fired?”

  “What’s the alternative?” Mokoya asked. “Sit around and wait for death?”

  “Will I sit around? Are my people the type to simply wait?” Akeha countered, between his teeth. Fire burned in him, a gleam of light fixed on the spectacle of martyrdom.

  “Keha.”

  “Come on,” Thennjay said, alarm gathering on his face. “We can’t just prepare for the worst. Come on. We haven’t even tried talking to the raja. We have to try.” He looked at Akeha, as close to desperation as she’d ever seen him. “Just let me try.”

  Chapter Nine

  BATAANAR WAS A CITY of curling streets, stacked with multilevel clay abodes and strung with shops that sold spices and fabric and hammered cook pots and cheap printed scrolls. The smell of roast meat and hot mutton fat hung over the outer quarters like a curtain. The three of them pushed their way toward the raja’s palace in the center of the city, elbow to elbow with the thick unquiet of Bataanar’s citizenry. First sunfall had come and gone, and the bazaars were wreathed in strings of sunballs, proper ones that dutifully gave off light and were unlikely to erupt in a volcanic pulse of heat and radiation.

  The city had brushed off the morning’s attack in the way cities with business to get to often do. Yet traces of emergency lingered. Conversations were subdued, contracted to the bare necessities of transaction. Merchants’ wares huddled on carts and in boxes, ready to be whisked away at a moment’s notice. Iron locusts patrolled the skies, hulking creatures of gray metal glowing with the raja’s seal, broadcasting curfew instructions in four languages.

  A sense of unease dogged Mokoya as she fell behind the other two. The gazes of shopkeepers and street vendors trailed her passage. Heavily wrapped women ducked their eyes at her approach and turned their heads once she walked past. Men, their hoods pulled tight around their heads, stared at her from side alleys and second-floor windows. Were they staring because they didn’t know who she was? Or were they staring because they did? She had draped her cloak over the bright colors of the lizard arm, but the scars on her face were unmistakable. Her entire face was unmistakable.

  She walked faster.

  Laid over Bataanar’s anxiety, Mokoya saw the ghost of Bengang Baru—the mutilated houses, the charred bones, the clogging, inescapable assault of putrefaction. The purge had happened six months ago, and she had pushed the memories deep into the quarantined districts of her mind. But it was all coming out of the ground again.

  A child-sized shoe lay by itself in the middle of a street, surrounded by destruction, its twin nowhere to be found. Its rim was stained sticky brown. Trying to imagine how it got there was worse than looking at the dead shells of houses. Somewhere Adi was calling her name, but all she could see was a foot ripped from an ankle, some scavenger coming by later to pry the flesh out of the shoe with sharp teeth—

  Mokoya desperately filled her lungs. The air in Bataanar was spiced with cinnamon, not decay. Under her breath, she whispered, “The Slack is all, and all is the Slack . . .”

  Akeha turned around. “What was that?”

  “Nothing.”

  Bataanar had ghosts of its own. Wherever she turned, there was the same picture—hung in gilt frames, draped with garlands, grayed by incense smoke—gracing the fronts of shops or peeping from their dimly lit interiors. An old portrait of the royal family. Raja Ponchak, smiling, ceremonially dressed, seated on a simple wooden chair with a plain gray backdrop. To the back and the left stood Raja Choonghey, tall and thin and sharp-faced. To the back and right was their daughter, Wanbeng, child-aged and apple-cheeked.

  The girl would be eighteen now, Mokoya calculated, with the selfish and gut-shredding pang that accompanied thoughts of other people’s daughters growing up.

  Mokoya had met Raja Ponchak and her family only once: eight years ago, when the city had been consecrated, its streets neat and empty and the air still papery with construction dust. Thennjay had officiated the ceremony. She remembered very little of Raja Ponchak, except for the fragrant white buds she had worn in her hair that day. Of her husband Mokoya recalled even less. She did remember Wanbeng, who at ten years of age had developed an armor of aloofness. She had refused to play with Eien, whom she’d called “a baby who hasn’t even picked their gender yet.” Eien had been three years old.

  It wa
s strange walking through Bataanar and recognizing shards of its architecture—the splendid blue minarets of its grand mosque, the lines of its library tower—but having next to no memory of having visited. Intellectually she knew she had been here before, but a fundamental disconnect lay between her and the Mokoya who had accrued these impressions. That Mokoya had walked these pristine streets carrying her young child, probably laughing and thinking happy thoughts now opaque to her.

  Maybe it was she who was the ghost.

  The streets changed as they threaded deeper into Bataanar. The crowds diluted. The shops and open doors on the ground floors gave way to six-yield-high walls and barricaded gates. There the air was quieter and drained of smell. Buildings bulged like well-fed bellies, sporting arched windows and lamp-shaped cutouts on their walls. The streets sloped upward, more steeply at some points than others. Above them loomed the golden teardrop domes of the royal palace.

  The raja’s palace was a series of round, white-walled stone buildings. A wide swath of extravagantly watered garden surrounded the compound, ardently lit and fragrant in the desert air. At its edge waited a statuesque figure: a woman with thick arms and a face that could light dreams. Her robes were that of a high-placed servant’s, simple, but well kept. Kebang? Mahanagay? Mokoya wasn’t sure.

  Akeha hissed when she saw her. “Get out of here, Silbya. You can’t block us from seeing the raja.”

  “I have no intention of doing so,” she said. “My mistress wishes to extend an invitation for an audience with Tensor Sanao.” She looked at Mokoya and made a small gesture of obeisance. “Tensor. My mistress, the raja’s advisor—”

  “Tan Khimyan,” Mokoya said. The expression on Akeha’s face had told her everything she needed. A brief spurt of adrenaline ran through her. “What does she want with me?”

  Silbya carried herself with calm and simplicity. “She has some matters she wishes to discuss. What they are, I cannot disclose.”

  Thennjay was looking at her in alarm. Akeha’s lips curled in distaste. But the emotion that poured through Mokoya burned like fire and felt like the hunger of a tiger smelling prey. She wanted to face this woman and stare her in the eyes.