He surged up, like a storm wave, and kissed Thennjay.
The boy’s lips were firm, easily parted, tasting and smelling like earth and nectar, sticky and pungent. As their tongues met, Akeha drowned, senses overwhelmed by a hundred different things at once, intoxicating and indescribable. Time warped and became meaningless.
Hands pushed against the curve of his back, firm and warm. Akeha broke from the kiss and pulled away, limbs trembling. His chest hurt. “No.”
Thennjay’s expression was equal parts sorrow and resignation. “Akeha . . .”
He found words somehow. “Promise me you’ll look after Mokoya. Promise me you’ll keep her happy.”
Thennjay looked like he was studying his face, trying to commit every line to memory. “I can’t promise that. I can only try.”
“That’s good enough for me.” He stepped away, out onto the edge of the roof. “She deserves to be happy.”
“Write to me,” Thennjay said. “Send me signs that you are well.”
Akeha dipped his chin in a nod. Not a promise, but not a refusal either. He would think about it, later, when he had gotten away. The taste of the boy lingered in his mouth as he dropped down to the waterline, to where the river rushed in an unending outward torrent.
Part Three
YONGCHEOW
Chapter Twelve
YEAR TWENTY-NINE
“WELL?”
The man held the device up to the lamp, squinting at the dull surface with its one engraved character, a clumsy groove. He was a heavyset Kuanjin fence with an old scar rippling across his face. Akeha did not know his name. Twenty more devices lay spread between them on unbound cloth, ready for inspection.
Sweat had gathered on the man’s lip. He tugged crudely through metal-nature and the device came alive. The warehouse’s air thickened as it dampened water-nature. The device was designed to hamper sound recorders: call it privacy baffling, or counterespionage, or whatever was convenient. Who the buyers were, Akeha did not know and did not care. His supplier was a praying mantis of a man he had met with in a narrow alley in Cinta Putri. Where he got the devices from, Akeha also did not care.
“Well?” he repeated.
The man grunted in assent and replaced the device amongst its brethren. The warehouse he chose was in a row long since abandoned, air thick with dust and choked with the smell of rotting grain. And quiet. That was the important thing.
Satisfied with his inspection, the man reached into his sleeve and tossed Akeha a small pouch. It landed in his hands with a solid metallic clunk. He looked inside and nodded.
In the distance someone screamed.
Akeha frowned. A street over, the Slack burst with flowers of activity. Tensors fighting, clumsy sledgehammer attacks that betrayed a lack of pugilistic training. He listened: shouts, in Kuanjinwei. At least three involved.
His buyer noticed. “Protectorate business,” he said.
Akeha grimly tucked the pouch away as he continued to listen, to watch the Slack. The pattern clarified: three attackers, one defender. All Tensors.
“Don’t get involved,” said the buyer. Not a warning, just advice.
“Our business is done,” Akeha said. He straightened up and walked away. Behind him, the man snorted in derision of Akeha’s judgment.
The streets were dusky and silent enough that muffled shouting echoed. This part of Jixiang, a mercantile quarter, had been abandoned in the tides of changing fortunes. Warehouses sat with gaping mouths that could swallow thieves, smugglers, the poor, the desperate. Akeha crossed spaces briskly: the fighting had subsided into a fierce glow in the Slack. All four Tensors remained alive, clustered in one of the yawning derelicts.
Akeha stayed in the shadows by the warehouse’s entrance, his footprint in the Slack light and practiced. Three soldiers woven up in the Protectorate’s padded gray faced a gasping young man in civilian dress. Blood covered half his head, seeped through the front of his tunic. The soldiers stood in a fan: two flanking, the leader confronting the bleeding man with some kind of tube weapon.
“Tell me where it is, and this can end,” said the soldier with the tube. A man. The weapon crackled as he smacked it in his hand.
“You can threaten me with pain or death. I’m not afraid. And I won’t tell you—”
The weapon sang, and electricity struck. The young man screamed and fell to his knees. Chemical burn seared the air.
In the ringing silence, the young man struggled back upright. “I won’t tell you anything.”
Akeha carried a dozen flying daggers: tucked in his belt, around his arms, on the border of his calves. He was aware of their weight, their heft, and the speed at which he could hurl them in between heartbeats. He was aware of many things at that moment.
He hadn’t been noticed. It was not too late to walk away.
But Mokoya wouldn’t, he knew.
Akeha closed his eyes, slowed his breathing.
His blow fell through water-nature. A shockwave knocked all four men flat. Akeha moved. The first soldier to stand died with a blade between the eyes, skull shattered from the force of the impact. The second was hit in the throat and collapsed, choking on flesh and gristle.
The leader surged forward, grasping at the Slack in panic. His weapon snarled with energy. Too slow. Akeha closed his hand. Water-nature responded. Like a noose, it snapped around the man’s neck. Bone disintegrated, flesh ruptured, and the man dropped like a slab of fish, blood pooling around the ruin.
Akeha exhaled. Red patterned the ground in chaotic gouts, but he remained clean. None of the soldiers moved again. The Slack settled into reservoir calm.
The wounded young man sat on the floor where he had fallen, eyes round, mouth a gaping circle. As Akeha stepped out of the shadows, he scrambled backward, terrified, whispering prayers as though faced with the devil himself.
Akeha walked up to him and wordlessly held out a hand.
The young man stared at it. Thoughts and emotions filtered visibly across his narrow face. When he reached the point of realizing death was not forthcoming, he crumpled to the ground in a heap and started to pray. Akeha had been around Katau Kebang long enough to recognize words of gratitude to the Almighty.
He allowed himself a sigh.
When the young man finished praying, he fixed his eyes on Akeha with surprising clarity. “Who are you?”
“A friend. We need to leave.”
“Who sent you?”
He scowled, already regretting his involvement. “The fortunes.”
“Was it Lady Han?”
“It was your Almighty,” Akeha snapped. “Do you want to live or not?”
The man studied Akeha’s face for a moment more, and his expression changed again. Suspicion had lodged there, along with a measure of curiosity. “You look like her.”
“What?”
“The seer. You look like her. Are you—no, it can’t be. Are you?”