Akeha unfolded himself. “Yes.”
“Congratulations?” The sentence came out half statement, half question; Yongcheow didn’t know what to make of the destruction either. He’d put up his own barrier, following Akeha’s example. Yongcheow scanned the lines of his lover’s face until confidence returned to him, then gently stroked his cheek. “I knew you could do it. I’m sure Lady Han will be delighted.”
Akeha, standing at the gates of Hell, said, “That’s what I’m afraid of.”
Yongcheow didn’t sigh, but the look on his face was grim. Akeha changed the topic. “I take it the exchange went well?”
“Yes. I’ve sent the merchant on his way.” Old habits made them speak in vague terms, even with nothing left alive to eavesdrop on them.
“Good.” He looked at the cloth parcel in Yongcheow’s other hand and frowned. “You brought dinner.”
A smile beamed through the gloom on Yongcheow’s face. “I cooked. It turned out surprisingly well. This time.”
The strangeness in the air chewed at him still. Akeha suppressed a shudder. “You shouldn’t have brought it here. Now it’s contaminated.” By what, he didn’t know. But just to be safe: “We’ll have to get rid of it.”
Yongcheow studied his expression and came to a grave understanding. He chuckled purposefully. “If you didn’t want to eat my cooking, you could have just said so.”
He emptied the containers over the poisoned ground. Soup noodles, the broth thick with nuts and spices, a recipe from his mother’s side of the family. Guilt flared through Akeha: it smelled good, especially by Yongcheow’s standards. He’d have to ask him to try again later. To make up for it.
*
They had vinegar noodles from a roadside stall back in Bunshim, perched on a bench next to the lively gullet of the city’s legendary perfumed quarter. Immersed in the warm glow of sunballs, the tart vapor of noodle broth, and the jabber of the drunk and the soon-to-be drunk, Akeha finally felt the unease quietly drain out of him, leaving him a normal person again.
The defector had killed herself not long after she’d passed her manuscripts to the Machinists. A washerwoman had gone up to her room in the safe house and found her curled into a stiff comma, a vial of poison spilled on the floor. Akeha had struggled to understand this—why flee, why spend agonizing weeks evading capture, if death had always been the final destination? If suicide had been the plan, why not perish in the flames with the rest of her division?
Now he understood. She had wanted the Machinists to know. Just in case she hadn’t been thorough enough. This was her insurance, her gamble against his mother’s ruthlessness. Her hope that both sides, understanding the horror of what had been wrought, would never resort to using these—what had he decided to call them again? These weapons.
“They’re too risky to be effective,” he said, partly to Yongcheow, partly to himself. “The slackcraft is too complex; most Tensors won’t have that much focus. If you do it wrong, you’ll destroy your own troops.”
“No doubt.” Yongcheow was thoughtful. “But you can do it.”
“I can. I’m not like most Tensors.”
“Isn’t it a good thing you’re on our side, then.”
They watched a dancer with a green ribbon in her hair flirting with a ship’s captain. “I nearly forgot,” Yongcheow said, in a tone meaning he hadn’t forgotten at all. “The merchant had something for you. A small surprise from the Grand Monastery.”
A flutter in his chest. “A letter?”
“Better than that.” Yongcheow reached into his sleeves and withdrew a cloth bundle the size of a plum. The same size as the yet-unnamed weapons. “It’s a gift. From your niece.”
“My niece.” Mokoya’s daughter. He unwrapped the bundle delicately.
Thick burlap peeled away to reveal a corkscrew of gleaming white petals, crudely shaped but recognizable as a lotus blossom. The grain of the ceramic whispered of shaping and firing by slackcraft. Akeha turned it around with vigilant fingertips, marveling at its construction.
Under the glass piece lay a note on lovingly crumpled gray paper. Unsteady brushstrokes read: To Uncle Akeha, from Eien.
Yongcheow watched him struggle to contain his expression and snorted. Akeha didn’t care, caught in the swell of warmth like a tidal wave. “Her slackcraft is improving,” he said.
“Well, with a mother like that, and her father the Head Abbot, I would be surprised if it didn’t.”
The glass lotus lay dwarfed by the palm of his hand, and he was seized by a sudden terror of dropping it. He had to find a safe place for it, somewhere padded and concealed. To Uncle Akeha, from Eien. With all the horrors in the world, it was easy to forget there were wonders too.
“Thank you,” he said to Yongcheow, even though his words were directed a thousand li away, at a smiling child he had never met and who had never met him.
*
They were threading toward sleep when Yongcheow ambushed him. “Have you ever thought about having children?”
Akeha froze. “What?” Remarkable that after the day’s happenings, the question still managed to unsettle him. His heart spun in his chest as he scrambled for an answer, a drowning man seeking dry land. “I don’t know. Why? Are you thinking about having children?”
“I asked you first.”
I’m the least fatherly person I know. “What would we do with a child on the run?”
“Mmh.”
Silence settled over the room. Akeha pushed up on one elbow, trying to read his partner’s face in the gloom. The clouded moonlight gave him nothing. The unspoken agreement was that neither of them was interested in parenthood. Or so he’d thought. “Yongcheow. Do you want children?”
“No. I was just curious. Just wondering.”
With Yongcheow there was no such thing as just wondering. “What’s wrong?” When the man didn’t answer, he pressed further: “What were you really asking?”
Yongcheow let the appropriate beats go by before firing the shot. “Why won’t you go back to Chengbee?”
Akeha sank onto the bed with a sigh. It always came down to this. Every year, every turning of the seasons, Yongcheow would ask him the same question, and he would give up the same excuses, the same nonanswers. When would he tire of this back-and-forth?
His lover said, “It’s been years. The girl’s growing up fast.”
“I know.”
“Why won’t you go back? Even for a visit?”
“I can’t.” Akeha wasn’t sure he could explain it in words to himself, much less someone else. Why couldn’t he return to the place of his birth? Because tigers prowled in the woods, and giant snakeheads circled in the water. He just couldn’t. “Now’s not the time.”
Yongcheow stayed silent for a few seconds, and Akeha knew the pensive expression on his face without looking. “I want to see her too.”
“I know. Someday you will. When the time is right.” An indefinite hope of things changing, a watery promise. Akeha listened to the cycle of Yongcheow’s breathing, dreading further interrogation. But none was forthcoming. Apparently satisfied with Akeha’s dilute answers, Yongcheow drifted off into sleep.