Mokoya swallowed audibly. Memories crashed to the surface: his sister as a child, shaking and weeping in dark beds after a vision ripped through her. She’d done nothing to deserve this.
Twelve years apart, and the first thing he did was upset her. Where were the tender words he had imagined would burst forth when they saw each other again, older and wiser and settled in their places in the world? “Moko.” He brushed his palm against her cheek. She flinched, and something in him broke, but then she leaned into his touch. He waited until he could speak without shaking. “Why are you here?”
She took his hand, grasped it between hers. “I want you to come home.”
He shook his head. “Moko, I—”
“I’m pregnant.”
He stopped, stunned. “What?”
A smile crept across the pale trench of her face. “The child won’t be along for months, but—Thennjay and I have been trying for a while, and finally—”
“Congratulations,” he said, softly, in wonder.
“Come back,” she said, pressing into his hand. “Come back to the monastery. Thennjay can give you asylum. You’ll be safe. Mother can’t do anything. Please, Keha.” Her voice cracked, equal parts hope and sorrow. “Come home. I don’t want to raise a child who’s never met you.”
Akeha’s hand shook in hers. He imagined her child listening to their mother’s stories, trying to conjure up an uncle they knew only through words. His resolve softened, began to melt. It was tempting, so tempting, to say yes, to be forgiven, to return, to shape a glorious, shining future—
He turned away, terrified. There was Yongcheow, in a corner, struggling to keep his expression neutral. No matter what Akeha chose, he would still be here. He couldn’t return to the capital. And the spider-grasp of the Protectorate would continue to ensnare Machinists, out here and everywhere. That would still happen.
No. He turned to her. “I can’t.” Her mouth moved to register protests, and he said, “Moko, listen. You can’t stay here. It’s not safe. You have to go back.”
“Keha—”
“Go back home, Moko. You have a new family coming. Focus on your future. Forget about me.”
“Forget?”
He held her face in his hands. “What you and Thennjay are doing in the monastery—that’s important. Someone has to fight Mother from within. But that was never going to be me.”
Because he had always known, even as a child, that he was the lightning, while she was the fire in the core of planets. And the world needed both. Revolutions needed both. Someone had to wield the knives, but someone also had to write the treaties.
“My place is out here. You understand, don’t you?”
She trembled, as angry as she was devastated. “I’ve missed you so much.”
“I know.” And, great Slack, did he know. Deep in the pit of his belly, reaching up to suffocate him on the longest nights. He crushed her in a hug. “I know, Moko. I’ve missed you too.”
He let her cry herself empty on his shoulder. And later, when she had gone, as he crumpled against a solid surface struggling for sense and air, he let Yongcheow hold him, until he, too, was empty.
Much later, in the dark where they lay together in bed, skin to skin, Yongcheow asked, “Why didn’t you go with her?”
Akeha found Yongcheow’s hand and curled fingers against fingers. “Let the black tides of heaven direct our lives,” he murmured. He turned to look at his partner. “I choose to swim.”
Part Four
MOTHER
Chapter Eighteen
YEAR THIRTY-FIVE
WHEN THE SMOKE CLEARED, it left nothingness in its wake.
It wasn’t nothingness, exactly—there was debris and churned mud and a thick overcoat of sticky char. Lumps of organic ballast swelled from the ground, leaving the burnt landscape undulating like a graveyard. But as Akeha walked through the spongy ruin of the test site, he felt only nothingness around him. Nothingness clawed at his back and sides where the living trunks of linden trees had stood. Nothingness yawned in the cauterized air where there should have been the tang of nectar and sap and well-fed humus. Nothingness blanketed the muffled soil under his feet where once lay a thick layer of crisp autumn shedding.
The blast radius around him was a hundred yields wide. Akeha had stood on a nearby hill and shot the test device into the middle of the woods, a scallop of temperate wilderness just outside the port city of Bunshim. He’d made the weapon right, he thought, following the directives scribbled in the defector’s spindly hand. He’d performed the slackcraft as instructed, melting the gas within the tiny steel shell with so much fire-and earth-nature that it was no longer gas but something they had no name for. He’d held on to that seething, violent miasma for as long as his focus had allowed, letting go at the last possible moment, freeing the terrible energy that had accumulated within. The resulting shockwave—a balloon of gray shrouding bloodred—had knocked him off his feet from hundreds of yields away.
So this is what it does, he thought, walking through the carbonized aperture left behind. He’d known the device was a weapon, but he’d expected something like a big firecracker or a thunder bomb. Not this. The edges of the explosive wound harbored recognizable fragments—half-melted trees and charred mounds that had once been animals, felled not knowing what had hit them. But here, in the middle of the crater, the heat and light had been so intense that nothing was left except fine black ash. Everything had been pulverized at the moment of detonation.
The air felt wrong. Something lingered in it, worming through the Slack in glowing, infinitesimal paths. Coming down the hill toward the crater Akeha had put a barrier around himself, a protective layer of forest-nature just in case the blast had been toxic. That barrier was now under attack, being slowly clawed through by the changed air. As though the atoms of the dead things, too, had turned into ghosts that wanted to possess him. Wanted to drag him into dissolution with them.
The defector had come from one of the Tensorate’s secret divisions: sixteen Tensors playing on the radiant fringe of slackcrafting knowledge, manipulating the fine forces at the boundary of the five natures. One mad day the defector had killed her fifteen colleagues, burned the lab to the ground, and fled the capital city with the last copies of their manuscript. Standing in the middle of the blast grounds, feeling like death incarnate, a destroyer of worlds, Akeha began to understand why.
This weapon needed a name. Akeha had another prototype swinging from his belt like a moon, and it begged for taxonomy that bayed of what it could do. He thought about fire and death and otherworldly annihilation. The word “jinn” drifted toward him. “Ifrit.” Perhaps.
Some time later Yongcheow found him kneeling before what remained of a deer, reciting a guilt-tinged prayer for its soul.
“So it works,” he said hesitantly, looking out over the ruined landscape. “You did it.”