Watching them, Akeha’s lungs filled with pressure, as if the air had nowhere to go.
“I’ve decided,” Mokoya said, straightening up, eyes bright and hard as jewels. “After my confirmation, I’m not applying to the Tensorate academy. I want to return to the Grand Monastery.” They tightened their fingers around Thennjay’s. “Mother can’t stop me. I’ll be twenty-one in a few years, an adult.”
“It won’t be the same place you grew up,” Thennjay warned. “After all, I’ll be in charge.”
“I know. And you’ll need help. The old monks aren’t going to accept change easily.”
Thennjay said, in his low, smooth baritone, “I’ll be glad to have you there.”
He had leaned in, closing the gap between his body and Mokoya’s. Akeha already knew where this was going. It came from a playbook older than the Protectorate, older than human civilization. The confines of the room felt heavy, felt like prison walls.
A smirk cracked through Mokoya’s seriousness. “I thought you didn’t trust me.”
Thennjay wrinkled his nose. “I guess I’m another big fool.”
He moved forward, toward Mokoya’s face. Akeha stood. The other two looked up in surprise, their small moment broken. It was as if they had forgotten Akeha was there.
“I’m going for a walk,” they announced. And they turned to leave, ignoring the small mewl of “Keha?” that sounded behind them.
*
Akeha walked, deliberately putting one foot ahead of the other, pointed in a direction they weren’t sure of. The Great High Palace was vast enough that they could wander for days and never recross the paths they trod. Their ambulation took them far from the servants’ quarters, deep into the diplomatic wing. Puddles of yellow light punctured the night darkness, infrequently broken by the passing shadows of palace staff, working deep into unsociable hours. One of them—an assistant to Diplomatic Minister Kinami—smiled patronizingly at Akeha as she passed by. “Wandering about without your twin?” As if she couldn’t imagine that Akeha had desires of their own, a mind of their own. They didn’t reply.
Akeha usually delighted in the night halves of night-cycles. Not because they were darker than the night halves of day-cycles—they weren’t—but because of the solitude they offered: the quiet corridors, the night song of crickets, the masses slumbering in their chambers. But tonight the solitude felt less like a warm cloak and more like a blanket pressed over the nose and the mouth. Thoughts thrashed through Akeha’s mind like dying fish, and like fish they slipped away the moment Akeha tried to focus on them. Instead a parade of images slithered by: a burnt, bloodied man. A girl’s face wet with tears. Mother’s icy, restrained rage. Things that they’d idly stood by and watched happen.
But even as they chased these piscine threads of thought, they knew that a shadowy epiphany, full of teeth and eyes, stalked behind them. They didn’t want to look at it. Didn’t want to think about it.
Back in the room, with Thennjay, Mokoya had slipped and used the feminine “I” pronoun.
It shouldn’t have bothered Akeha as much as it did. Mokoya’s choices were their own. Yet it felt like their twin was pulling away from them, standing at the prow of a ship headed into uncharted waters where Akeha could not follow.
Akeha walked and walked.
The diplomatic wing had a courtyard of its own, an austere stone garden with an enormous black plinth standing in its middle. The plinth was a work of art, titled Reflections upon the Past and the Future. Its ebony surface was polished to glasslike smoothness and lit by a dozen sunballs fixed to the ground. Standing in front of its massive bulk, Akeha’s reflection was superimposed over a void so pure and deep it seemed unending.
Akeha stared at themselves: the shorn head, the genderless robes, the stark facial features that were identical to Mokoya’s. Until a young person confirmed their gender, the masters of forest-nature kept the markers of adulthood at bay. They had never imagined themselves any other way. It frightened them to think that this was not true for Mokoya. A fundamental chasm had opened between them, through which many other things could slip.
Their inner voice whispered, conspiratorially, But that chasm’s always been there. You’ve always known it, Akeha.
They stared unblinking at their own face as they recited feminine pronouns like a sutra. I am. I want. I will. And like a sutra, the words came out of their mouth rote and meaningless. There was no connection between what was said and the person in the black mirror.
Akeha bit their lip. A thought occurred to them. In all honesty, it had been occurring to them for some time, and occurring with much greater frequency since Mokoya’s announcement two nights ago. It was a thought that took hold in the back of their mind whenever they looked at Thennjay, at the shape of his body underneath his clothes. A thought they had been trying to drown out, to ignore.
Slowly, as if stepping into the unilluminated edge of a lake, Akeha switched to using masculine pronouns.
I am. I want. I will.
Their heart quickened in their chest. The words rolled and clicked in their mind, sharp and electric.
I want. I want. I want.
Akeha had not grown up amongst men. There were male monks, to be sure, but they were not men as Kuanjin society considered men. There were no men in the Protector’s family, and few amongst those she allowed close to her. Men were creatures of distant fascination, with their broad backs and tanned cheeks, and Akeha had never considered that they might be one of them.
They imagined themselves dressing like a man, with their hair tied up like a man. It felt different. Not right, exactly, but there was something there.
I want. I want.
I am.
Akeha’s limbs trembled with the rush of adrenaline. This was it, the answer they had been looking for, scrambling to find over the past few days, ever since Mokoya dropped her basket of secrets. A new horizon unfolded, shining with ten thousand unnamed stars. New possibilities, new understandings, new ways of being. They should have thought of this earlier. Why hadn’t they thought of this earlier? It was like cutting themselves open and finding another creature living inside, nested in their blood and bones and guts. Fear and excitement seized them in equal parts. I should tell Mother, they thought. He thought.
Tell her before I change my mind.
*
Mother was in her sanctuary, contemplating the twined branches of cherry trees in the garden. Like Akeha, she was someone who hardly slept, and she preferred the company of one of her concubines when she did. Akeha approached her from the back, studying her silhouette. Looking at her, it was easy to imagine Mokoya in thirty years’ time, sitting gracefully in a courtyard like this, silk dress cascading around her. Face identical to Mother’s.