OF COURSE AKEHA WENT to the circus.
This time it was Mokoya who found the way out. A sympathetic gardener, an easily scalable wall, and a judicious use of slackcraft brought them to the city’s ground level without being caught. After the fuss thrown about their morning escapades, it was almost too easy, Akeha thought. But they weren’t about to complain.
The circus opened in the moon-half of the first night-cycle, and stretched into the sun-half of the second one. The audience numbered about a dozen, handfuls of Kuanjin and Gauri working class, chattering in their dialects, chewing through sweetmeats, greasing their fingers on fried dough sticks. Mokoya found seats in the front row, but Akeha chose to stand in the back, with a vantage over audience and performers both.
“Fine,” Mokoya said. “Suit yourself.”
The first act was a comedy duo, the usual bamboo-pole-soup-dumpling combination given a twist by comprising two middle-aged women in saris making jokes about sex and money, instead of two middle-aged men in robes making jokes about sex and money. Akeha scanned the crowd, the wings, the background. Thennjay was nowhere to be seen.
The comedy act was followed by an acrobatic troupe, earnest children who juggled heavy pots and flipped each other over a variety of stools and tables. Still no Thennjay. Akeha was used to being patient and staying very still, but irritated prickles flushed up their spine and raced across the skin of their neck. They pressed their teeth together.
Something odd caught their attention: in one of the back rows, a round-bellied man sat on the edge of the bench. He jiggled one leg relentlessly, bouncing his knee up and down, fingers drumming against his thigh. As Akeha watched, a tearful girl ran up: it was Anjal, the suspicious child from this morning. She grabbed the man’s arm, bobbing up and down on her feet, and Akeha didn’t need to know lip-reading or her language to understand that she was pleading for something.
The man wagged his head and shook her off. The girl hesitated, then ran off the way she came, still crying, clearly unsatisfied.
Strange. Where was her younger brother?
The lamps around the circus extinguished, plunging them into darkness. Akeha went rigid involuntarily and expanded their mindeye. The topography of living bodies lit up the Slack: audience, performers, constellations scattered around the tents of the living compound. These were the bright, simple stars of the common citizenry, borders whole and complete with few threads lashing them to the Slack—probably simple tricks they’d learned, mechanical spells to manipulate water-nature to help them with their work.
Then there was Mokoya, a comforting, blazing nova thick with embroidered filaments of light, solid cords of fibrous belonging stretching between them and Akeha. Through those connections Akeha sent a warning: Be careful. Something’s wrong.
What is it?
I’m not sure. Just be careful. Keep your mindeye open.
Mokoya’s star quivered with faint annoyance, but their presence sharpened into focus as they too opened their mindeye, shifting into the same plane of awareness as Akeha.
Then a third and unexpected presence appeared in the Slack.
The interloper glowed gently, his tapestry of Slack-connections not as complex as that of a fully trained Tensor, but still thick and thriving. Akeha recognized the intricate, furred edges into forest-nature that they often saw extending from the Tensorate’s masters of biology.
Cheebye. They swore silently. How had they not realized? Thennjay was no simple healer, dispensing prayers and compressed mixtures of medicine. They called him a doctor.
He was a Tensor, or had been taught by one.
As Thennjay pulled at metal-nature, the lights came up around them: sun-strips, taped around the periphery of the circus, on the tent awnings, under the benches, wrapped around Thennjay’s clothes. Akeha opened their eyes as the audience sighed in wonder. Thennjay held a tray of glowing spheres the size of ripe peaches, presumably part of his performance.
Akeha froze. The round-bellied man was gone. Empty space yawned on the bench where he had been. Where was he?
They spotted the man making his jittery way down the central aisle, toward Thennjay and Mokoya.
“Wait,” Akeha said, straightening up from their slouch.
The man started walking faster. People stared. Akeha broke into a jog after him as Mokoya, in the front row, stood in confusion. “Stop!”
The man turned to face Akeha. Sweat picked out the terrified expression on his face, and then—
He detonated.
Akeha barely had time to throw up half a barrier, a shoddy one. It stopped the fire, but not the force of the explosion. Their spine met the ground with a sharp snap.
They scrambled to their feet, ignoring the pain that shot up their back. “Moko!” The air filled with screams, crackled with sulfuric fumes. Akeha’s throat closed up, and their lungs heaved.
They smelled burning flesh. Akeha reached out and found Mokoya in the Slack, still luminous and steady. Thank fortune. They tensed through water-nature, dispersing black smoke so that they could see.
The man lay on the dirt, still alive, still groaning, meat crusted black and red. Clear fluid seeped through the cracks. Everything was blown in a perfect circle around him. Thennjay hovered over his doomed body, whispering urgently in their home language, holding the man’s flesh and soul together through the Slack.
Mokoya ran to Thennjay’s side, equal parts fear and anger. “What was that? What happened?”
Thennjay looked up at them, his splendid features hardened in anger. “Your mother,” he said.
*
They weren’t allowed into the tent with Thennjay and the dying man. Left outside, Mokoya smeared circular tracks into the packed dirt. As the sun rose into the second night-cycle, Akeha asked, “You didn’t realize he was a Tensor either, did you?”
Mokoya glared at them, and continued pacing.
“You were distracted. He was so charming—”
“Shut up.”
Akeha folded their arms and continued watching.
Mokoya made sixty-four more silent circuits before Thennjay stepped through the heavy canvas of the tent door. Sweat had collected on the front of his shirt, and blood stained his hands and clothes like cooking grease. He sighed with the weight of a thousand stones cast into water. “He’s gone.”
“That’s a pity,” Akeha said. The man might have been saved at a proper Tensor house of healing. The doctors, the masters of forest-nature, would have been able to reknit the shattered bones, rebuild the seared flesh. But Thennjay had said no. The community had said no. Akeha couldn’t blame them for their distrust.
“You lied to me,” Mokoya spat.
“I didn’t,” Thennjay said. “I said nothing. There’s a difference. You never asked how much slackcraft I knew.”