He stepped backward, putting space between them. The Protector sat up slowly, a thin line of blood marking her neck. His mother said nothing. What did the look on her face mean? Was she confused, angry, happy? Did she think he was a fool or a hero? He couldn’t tell. He couldn’t read her expression. Perhaps he never could.
He said, “Now I turn my back, and I walk away. Whatever you do next is your choice. It will be your choice alone.”
Akeha turned his back on his mother and began to walk.
He walked across the courtyard. Across its border and down the corridors where he had grown up. Any moment, he expected the claws of death to strike: a knife in the back, an arrow through the chest, the unbreakable grip of palace guards. Anything. Here were the ponds where he and Mokoya had spent afternoons chasing fish. There was the obelisk before which he first understood himself. With every minute, a different diorama from his past slid by, a reprise of all the opening gambits before the final moves were played. Any moment now.
Yet death still did not come. He was crossing the outer pavilions, one step after another, heading forward. There was the threshold of the Great High Palace; there were the endless stairs that would lead him away from all this. He did not slow down. He did not look back. He put one foot in front of the other, a lone figure traversing the wide spaces that had once defined him. It had begun to rain, the gray skies finally shedding their load. The drops pelted him, warm and thick on his face. He tasted air full of earth and sky. Below him Chengbee waited, growing and breathing and alive.
Akeha walked and walked and walked.
EPILOGUE
IT WAS ONE WEEK, ten long days, before Mokoya allowed Akeha to see her. Thennjay found him meditating in the courtyard and said, “If you want to talk, I think she might say something now.” She hadn’t asked for him specifically, but there had been a softening in the baffling wall of thorns she’d woven around herself after she woke.
The first thing he heard was a rhythmic smacking sound, like a butcher tenderizing meat in a market square. Mokoya stood in the exercise yard, her back to him, repeatedly punching something that hung from a tree.
He approached her slowly. Her tunic had the sleeves cut off, exposing the fact that her right arm was now red and blue. Not the colors of beaten flesh, but of plumage and blossom, rich and deep. As Akeha drew closer, the lizard grain of the skin became apparent, supple and hairless, ridges of keratin rising and swirling down the rippling flesh.
Mokoya punched the flour bag with the lizard arm—five times, six—then shook it out like a child with pins and needles.
“Moko,” he said.
She turned around. Saw him. Surprise, shock, then a carousel of unidentifiable emotions. A mass of scars crawled up the right side of her face, ropy and discolored.
She turned back to the flour bag without saying a word and started punching it again.
Akeha stood, waiting, while she struck out her anger, her grief, her frustration. Whatever demons clutched her in their grip. This was the Mokoya he remembered, full of emotion and impulse, always on her feet, always trying to think of something. On the streets of Jixiang and Cinta Putri and Bunshim, with the gulf of lakes and rivers between them, it had been so easy to turn her into this mythical figure, a distant and all-powerful entity insulated by the walls of the capital and the monastery. A prophet. The prophet. Beloved and abstract.
But she was also his sister. A mortal, a human being, a person. Made of flesh and sinew and bone and blood. And she could be hurt like anyone else.
Finally she let her arm hang loose, breathing hard. She didn’t turn around. “I’m sorry I wasted your time.”
“What do you mean? You didn’t.”
She cracked her knuckles. “You came because I was dying. You wanted to say good-bye, didn’t you?” She started hitting the flour bag again, punctuating each word with a painful slapping sound. “But I didn’t die.” Smack. Smack. “So you made the trip here for nothing.”
He swallowed. “Not for nothing.” She was a frenzied blur he was afraid to touch.
“Why else would you have come here? You could have done it, at any point. In the last eighteen years, Keha. At any point.” She was crying now, her breaths wheezing through her chest, through her new lungs, grown from Akeha’s own flesh. Her arm had changed color, stark yellow and black like a warning. She punched the bag twice more, so hard it swung like a pendulum, and rounded on Akeha. “You could have visited when she was alive. You could have met her.”
“I know. Moko, I know. I’m sorry. I am so, so sorry.”
She crumpled as the anger left her, and she allowed him to embrace her, allowed him to press her face into his chest as she wailed, pulling the fabric of his clothes into her balled fists. There was nothing he could say that would repair what had happened. Nothing could undo the fact that she had lost her daughter, her only daughter, the bright-eyed smiling girl that he had never met and now never would. He could only say, “I love you.” He said the words, over and over and over. I love you. I love you.
Because Mokoya was still alive. Whatever the fortunes had woven, whatever the Almighty had willed, Mokoya had survived. Whatever Akeha could or couldn’t do, he could love her. And love—that was all that had sustained them since they were children. Love, and nothing else. It was enough. As long as there was love, there would be hope. It was enough.
Keep reading for an excerpt from The Red Threads of Fortune, the twin novella to The Black Tides of Heaven, available now.
Chapter One
KILLING THE VOICE TRANSMITTER was an overreaction. Even Mokoya knew that.
Half a second after she had crushed the palm-sized device to a pulp of sparking, smoking metal, she found herself frantically tensing through water-nature, trying to undo the fatal blow. Crumpled steel groaned as she reversed her actions, using the Slack to pull instead of push. The transmitter unfolded, opening up like a spring blossom, but it was no use. The machine was a complex thing, and like all complex things, it was despairingly hard to fix once broken.
Mokoya might have stood a chance with a Tensor’s invention, anything that relied on knots of slackcraft to manipulate objects in the material world. But this was a Machinist device. It worked on physical principles Mokoya had never learned and did not understand. Its shattered innards were a foreign language of torn wires and pulverized magnets. The transmitter lay dead on her wrist, Adi’s strident voice never to squawk forth from it again.
“Cheebye,” she swore. “Cheebye.”
Mokoya repeated the expletive a third time, then a fourth and a fifth and a sixth, head bowed prayerfully over the transmitter’s corpse as she swayed on her mount. Phoenix breathed patiently, massive rib cage expanding and deflating, while her rider recited swearwords until her heart stopped stuttering.
The desert wind howled overhead.