by JY Yang
On their way up the tower, Thennjay and Mokoya had been stopped by an apologetic pair of palace guards. The princess wouldn’t be seeing anyone at the moment, they’d said. She was not well.
They had been close enough to the top that sounds echoed downward: somebody shouting. Mokoya had recognized Wanbeng’s voice. “Is the princess with someone?” she’d asked.
The guards’ nervous discretion had yielded under further questioning, trepidation and worry intertwined in the answers: No, she was alone. The princess sometimes talked to herself. She’d never really recovered from her mother’s death, see. It had gotten worse in the last few months, yes.
Now the girl was using distance as shield, keeping as much of it between them as possible. Her hands fluttered, occupied in moving scrolls and readers from one pile to another. “Oh. Yes. The fate of Bataanar. Because your precious Machinists believe the Protectorate spews death everywhere it goes. Destruction.”
“We have genuine reasons to believe that the troops will purge Bataanar,” Thennjay said. “Whatever his distaste for Machinists, your father can’t possibly desire a massacre of his people.” His manner was slow, honey-smooth, and diplomatic in a way Mokoya could never be.
But it was pointless. Wanbeng continued with her haphazard tidying, Thennjay’s overtures bouncing off the wall of her indifference. Eventually, she turned to face them. “Fine. Let’s make a bargain. I’ll talk to Father, if you do a favor for me.” As Thennjay opened his mouth to speak, she cut him off. “Not you. Her.”
Mokoya could imagine her mother being like this at eighteen. Her enchantment with the girl had faded fast. She folded her arms. “What kind of favor?”
Wanbeng’s tone was calculating. “You’re a Tensor.”
“They never revoked my membership, so yes, I suppose I am.”
“Good. Then you should know that two months ago I was accepted into the Tensorate academy.”
Mokoya frowned. The Tensorate academy accepted barely a hundred students each year, and commoners could spend a lifetime taking the admission exams and fail every time. But Wanbeng was nobility, and her father had already been a high-ranking official in the Protectorate before he married Raja Ponchak. Of course she would be accepted.
Thennjay said, “Congratulations. Your father must be very proud.”
Wanbeng’s stuttering laugh sounded like a string of firecrackers going off. “Of course he is. It was what he wanted.”
“You don’t sound happy about it,” Mokoya said.
“Happy? Happy? Did anyone ask what would make me happy? No. I want my acceptance rescinded. Tensor Sanao, this is your half of the bargain.”
“You don’t want to enter the academy,” Mokoya said, slow comprehension—adjacent to sympathy—descending upon her.
The girl folded her arms. “I would rather die than go. Who wants to live in Chengbee? I don’t know anyone there.”
When Mokoya was eighteen, her mother had said, I’ll only let you marry him if you go to the Academy. This is nonnegotiable. Oh, she understood what Wanbeng felt. Yet: “I can’t do what you ask.”
The girl’s white teeth showed like darts. “You’re the Protector’s daughter, aren’t you? Anything you want, you just have to ask. Nobody will refuse you!”
Mokoya’s lip curled sardonically. “You don’t understand the situation at all, do you?” She preferred to spare children from the barbs of her sarcasm, but if this one thought she had any sway left with the apparatus of the Protectorate—well. She could have been far more scathing.
Wanbeng looked first at her, then at Thennjay, before she shrugged and smiled. “Then I won’t talk to Father. Go away.”
The words were childish, and from the casual way she said them, Mokoya realized Wanbeng wasn’t truly concerned about the academy at all. The girl was deflecting, aimlessly moving troops around on the board until they went away.
Still Thennjay persisted as Wanbeng turned back to shifting things from one pointless location to the other. “Wanbeng, this isn’t a game. Thousands of people could die if we do nothing.”
No response. The girl’s gaze was fixed on a particularly haphazard pile: stacked scrolls mixed with paper codices and loose sheaves annotated with ink. Her fingertips drummed on the desk surface.
There had to be something she could be pushed to care about.
Mokoya said, “Do it for your mother’s sake, if nothing else.”
Wanbeng spun as though Mokoya’s words had been a firebrand. “Don’t talk to me about my mother,” she hissed. “You don’t, you—” Her voice grew tight, then faltered. Her hands curled into weapons. “Get out.”
Something was off. Mokoya had expected grief from her, or anger. But it was guilt and fear that had taken hold of her face.
Thennjay remained stubborn, jumping onboard Mokoya’s pivot. “Wanbeng,” he said, “We knew your mother. The welfare of the city was her first priority—”
“You know nothing,” Wanbeng said. Seismic stress filled her voice. She was only eighteen, and the fragility of her youth was showing. “Nothing about her life, or her death, or—” She sucked in a breath. “You met my mother once. You never knew her.”
During this tirade, Mokoya’s eyes had fallen on one of the long, thin desks. Recognition knifed through her ribs at the same time she wondered why she hadn’t noticed it earlier. Resting on the pile of writings on Wanbeng’s desk was a beautiful, perfectly geometrical object. A coruscating, hollow dodecahedron, covered in delicate figurines of the zodiac in repose.
Everything else fell away. “What is that?” Mokoya asked, pointing, even though she knew the answer.
Wanbeng stepped in front of the desk defensively, as if to block it from Mokoya’s view, as if she could distract Mokoya into forgetting its existence. “What is what?” Her face had gone stiff with apprehension.
Mokoya could barely think over the blood-rush chorus in her head. “That trinket. Where did you get it?”
The princess licked her lips. “It was a gift. I don’t remember who gave it to me.” She answered almost immediately, but there was enough of a pause, enough of a note of panic in her voice that Mokoya knew she was lying.
“What’s going on?” Thennjay asked.
Mokoya lunged forward. Wanbeng seized her by the wrist, but one pulse through water-nature sent her flying, her hip connecting with an overladen desk. Objects clattered to the ground.
“Nao!” Thennjay exclaimed.
Her hand closed around the anchor. Again: a wash of sensations, a new bouquet of smells and emotions. Orange blossom, sandalwood and incense, a memory of running in the rain and laughing.
Mokoya held it up as Wanbeng scrambled to her feet, wide-eyed. “Where did you get this?” she demanded. “Don’t lie to me.”
“Give it back!” The girl made a swipe for it, clumsy and ineffective.
“Where did you get it?” Mokoya repeated, as Thennjay pleaded in confusion, “Nao . . .”
Wanbeng’s feet were broadly planted in a fighting stance, but fear had drained the color from her face. “You don’t even know what it is. Why do you care?”
“I know exactly what it is,” Mokoya snarled. “Who gave it to you?” And why? she thought. For what purpose?
Wanbeng’s face turned gemlike, hard and precisely cut. She defiantly tilted her chin upward. “I stole it from Tan Khimyan’s room.”
Heartbeat like thunder, tropical storm raging in her veins. “Did you?”
“I did. I steal her trinkets all the time. You saw me, and you said nothing.” Her face flushed. “That thing was hers; now it’s mine. Give it back!” The girl made another lunge for it and missed.
Mokoya held the anchor over her head. She was no longer a person, just a collection of screaming nerves. She folded the Slack around herself and was gone.
Chapter Thirteen
IT’S NOT AN ANCHOR, Mokoya thought. It’s a signpost. Or a key to a series of doors. With the dodecahedron in her hand, the Slack lit up with a constellation o
f beacons, each one whispering to her with flavors and emotions, a near-overwhelming chorus of feeling.
She picked the one she knew: the tastes of summer, fruit ripe and sweet.
Mokoya unfolded onto the shifting ground outside Bataanar. The sands swallowed her balance and sent her to her knees. She pushed herself upright one-handed, the other still clutched around the anchor. Black fury had swallowed the brilliant shock and confusion on her right arm, turning the skin the color of char, the color of a starless night.
Bramble’s serrated form stood stark against the sea of canvas peaks. Phoenix was nestled asleep under her wing, waking as Mokoya strode by, her steps kicking up long plumes of fine sand. Mokoya ignored Phoenix’s plaintive bleats as she vanished into the ant-nest interior of the tent city. The incandescence of her anger left little space for anything else.
Rider had lied. They had lied to her, and she had believed them, like a fool. Fuck. Cheebye. Always the trusting one, she never learned, she always ended up regretting it—
Rider was reading, curled on the bed with one of the journals she had given them, when Mokoya entered the tent. The smile on their face evaporated as she stormed toward them. “Mokoya? What—”
Mokoya flung the anchor into their lap. The object rolled off and onto the bed. They stared at it as if it might explode.
“You know what that is, don’t you?”
“I—” They twitched like a rabbit.
“Pick it up.”
Rider shook their head. “Mokoya, please, let me—”
“Pick it up.”
Rider’s shaking hands obediently lifted the anchor off the bed. They held it at arm’s length. Their voice was reedy: “You went to see the princess.”
“You lied to me.” The words burst out of Mokoya like spear points through the throat, through the chest. Rage and betrayal were going to split her from the inside, rip her into a thousand shards of flesh and spit her into the wind. “You put this anchor in Tan Khimyan’s room. You stole her notes.”
They gasped. “What? No. I did not.”
“And I wouldn’t have known if Wanbeng hadn’t taken the anchor from her room.”
Rider pleaded, fingers white against the anchor, “Mokoya, you’ve got it wrong, I—”
“You summoned that naga.”
“No!”
Mokoya struck the anchor from their hands. “Stop lying to me!”
Rider cried out and ducked; as Mokoya stood over the bed, chest heaving, dizzy on her feet, she saw that they were curled in an animal cower, pressed to the bed in fear.
The anchor rolled on the ground, grating and grating, its orbits degrading into successively smaller and quicker ones. On the bed Rider shook and gasped. What had she done?
Mokoya’s mouth and throat were dry. “I wasn’t going to hit you. Rider, I—” She reached out.
Rider flinched. A blink, a shudder in the Slack, and they’d flashed to the other side of the tent. Mokoya turned. “Rider, wait.”
“I didn’t do it,” they whimpered. A groan cracked their voice, like ice the second before it collapsed into rushing river.
Mokoya stepped toward them. “Rider—”
The Slack spasmed. Rider was gone. In their wake they left kaleidoscopic polygons that whispered, Outside, outside. Mokoya tried to follow but failed. She wasn’t calm or practiced enough for this form of traveling.
She scrambled outside into roiling chaos. In the distance, Bramble bellowed in protest, disturbed from her rest. Rider was leaving.
Mokoya sprinted after them, heels twisting in soft sand. The narrow guts of the tent city were not friendly to quick movement. She collided, shins and elbows and shoulders, with crates and animal cages and irate merchants who spewed obscenities at her. “Cheebye!” she spat back automatically.
She’d seen the kind of fear that now drove Rider. It was the fear of someone who had endured one beating too many.
What had she done?
When she reached Bramble’s side, Rider was already mounted. “Wait,” she shouted up, “Rider, wait!”
“Don’t touch me,” Rider beseeched. “Don’t come near me.”
“I wasn’t going to hurt you,” Mokoya said. “I would never hit you, I promise.”
“I didn’t do it,” they repeated, as if they had forgotten how to say anything else. They drove their heels into Bramble’s side, and the naga took off.
Mokoya collapsed in the tidal wave of displacement. “Rider!” she shouted after them.
Nothing. Bramble cut away into the sky. All strength left Mokoya. The ground was calm, heat and mass and weight, a wide unmoving swath in the Slack. Unlike herself. She wanted to be the ground. She lay down. She stopped moving.
Breath on her neck, a massive nudge against her side and back. Phoenix, agitated, checking in on her. She didn’t understand what was happening, why her friend had been taken away, why the one who was not her mother was so upset.
Mokoya wanted to touch Phoenix, wanted to calm this one who was not her daughter. But she couldn’t speak or move her head. She floated in and out of focus. Count something. Count your breaths. Say something familiar.
The Slack is all, and all is the Slack. The Slack is all, and all is the Slack. The Slack is all, and all is the Slack.
That’s how Thennjay found her, lying in the sand, shadowed by Phoenix, mouth moving soundlessly over and over again.
“What’s going on, Nao?”
She looked up at him, broad and stark against the sky. His sweat-coated chest heaved with air; he must have run there from the library tower. He was worried. He was right to be worried.
“Rider’s gone,” she said. “I scared them.”
He knelt beside her and helped her up. “Did they do something?”
“They’re the ones who called the naga.”
Thennjay frowned. “Why would you say that?”
“Because they are.” What he needed was an explanation from the old Mokoya, the clever one, the one who wasn’t a cracked and draining person.
“That thing you found in Wanbeng’s room. That was proof?”
She nodded.
“And you’re absolutely sure?”
She inhaled until her chest hurt. She couldn’t just nod in assent. She had to say it. Her mind had to form the words, her tongue had to shape them, her lungs had to give them life.
“I am sure,” she said.
“Nao, I’m sorry. I don’t know what to say.” Thennjay held her arms gently. She couldn’t tell if it was pity or sympathy in his face. She supposed it didn’t matter. “What shall we do now?”
She didn’t know. “I need to think.”
“Are you going to tell Akeha?”
Something in Thennjay’s voice told her he knew that she wasn’t sure, that she was lying when she said she was. “Thenn, I need to think. Please, leave me alone for a while.” The words came out more desperate than she had intended. “Please.”
Chapter Fourteen
THE SUN FELL and rose again while Mokoya dissolved on the bed. She drifted in and out of consciousness, the long, twisted happenings of the day unfurling within her like tea leaves in hot water. Fragmented faces and lines of arguments broke through the surface of her thoughts before sinking again. Things that she had missed or ignored when they happened gained a dubious significance with every successive apparition. In the marsh of half sleep, everything was perfectly logical, but nothing made any sense.
Her capture pearls stood in a line on the makeshift desk, tempting her with their stores of happiness. But they were untouched. Now was not the time.
Eventually a semblance of lucidity returned to her. Outside the tent it was darkening: sunfall again. Had she really lain on the bed for six hours?
Rider loomed heavy in her thoughts. She walked herself through all the brief moments they’d shared together, like a pilgrim circling a sacred arena over and over, hoping to find enlightenment.
Something wasn’t right. The map sketched out by the events di
dn’t make sense, didn’t join up into a recognizable landscape. Rider was the one controlling the naga, but they were with Mokoya when it attacked the city. Why hadn’t Mokoya noticed anything? Why did Rider risk their life fending off the beast?
She regretted lashing out at Rider. In another version of the world, where the threads of fortune had woven a different braid, they could have sat down together and fileted out a sensible truth, exposing the spine of reality that had to be buried within the slippery flesh of lies and narratives.
The bed still smelled faintly of Rider. She was plagued by visions of them as they shivered upon it, as they held up the anchor, terrified of what Mokoya might do. You went to see the princess, they had said, their voice quaking.
Mokoya opened her eyes, jolted by realization. Why did Rider say the princess? The anchor was supposed to be with Tan Khimyan. Unless—
The last moments in the library tower tore through her head with adrenaline-stripped clarity: the clutter, the blazing light, Wanbeng’s nervous flurries of activity.
Those notes.
Air occluded Mokoya’s chest. Shards of evidence fused into a glittering whole. “She lied to me.”
Wanbeng had lied to her. She hadn’t stolen the anchor—it had been in her room all along. Rider had said as much. And it was Wanbeng who had stolen Tan Khimyan’s notes. They’d been right there, in her room, hiding in plain sight.
And Rider? Had she colluded with Wanbeng? Or tried to stop her?
She leapt to her feet, scrambling for her talker. She had to tell Thennjay—Akeha—they might all still be in danger—
Too late. A horn wailed from Bataanar’s walls.
Cacophony from outside: people shouting. Adi’s raptors barking from elsewhere in the camp.
No.
Mokoya snatched her cudgel from the ground and ran out of the tent.
There: a sound like a giant’s heart beating, the sweep of massive wings. The naga was in the sky, heading straight for the unprotected city, exposed and vulnerable like an oyster cracked open.
Adi and the crew spilled from the tents alongside her. Where was Thennjay? In the city?
