The guards’ nervous discretion had yielded under further questioning, trepidation and worry intertwined in the answers: No, she was alone. The princess sometimes talked to herself. She’d never really recovered from her mother’s death, see. It had gotten worse in the last few months, yes.
Now the girl was using distance as shield, keeping as much of it between them as possible. Her hands fluttered, occupied in moving scrolls and readers from one pile to another. “Oh. Yes. The fate of Bataanar. Because your precious Machinists believe the Protectorate spews death everywhere it goes. Destruction.”
“We have genuine reasons to believe that the troops will purge Bataanar,” Thennjay said. “Whatever his distaste for Machinists, your father can’t possibly desire a massacre of his people.” His manner was slow, honey-smooth, and diplomatic in a way Mokoya could never be.
But it was pointless. Wanbeng continued with her haphazard tidying, Thennjay’s overtures bouncing off the wall of her indifference. Eventually, she turned to face them. “Fine. Let’s make a bargain. I’ll talk to Father, if you do a favor for me.” As Thennjay opened his mouth to speak, she cut him off. “Not you. Her.”
Mokoya could imagine her mother being like this at eighteen. Her enchantment with the girl had faded fast. She folded her arms. “What kind of favor?”
Wanbeng’s tone was calculating. “You’re a Tensor.”
“They never revoked my membership, so yes, I suppose I am.”
“Good. Then you should know that two months ago I was accepted into the Tensorate academy.”
Mokoya frowned. The Tensorate academy accepted barely a hundred students each year, and commoners could spend a lifetime taking the admission exams and fail every time. But Wanbeng was nobility, and her father had already been a high-ranking official in the Protectorate before he married Raja Ponchak. Of course she would be accepted.
Thennjay said, “Congratulations. Your father must be very proud.”
Wanbeng’s stuttering laugh sounded like a string of firecrackers going off. “Of course he is. It was what he wanted.”
“You don’t sound happy about it,” Mokoya said.
“Happy? Happy? Did anyone ask what would make me happy? No. I want my acceptance rescinded. Tensor Sanao, this is your half of the bargain.”
“You don’t want to enter the academy,” Mokoya said, slow comprehension—adjacent to sympathy—descending upon her.
The girl folded her arms. “I would rather die than go. Who wants to live in Chengbee? I don’t know anyone there.”
When Mokoya was eighteen, her mother had said, I’ll only let you marry him if you go to the Academy. This is nonnegotiable. Oh, she understood what Wanbeng felt. Yet: “I can’t do what you ask.”
The girl’s white teeth showed like darts. “You’re the Protector’s daughter, aren’t you? Anything you want, you just have to ask. Nobody will refuse you!”
Mokoya’s lip curled sardonically. “You don’t understand the situation at all, do you?” She preferred to spare children from the barbs of her sarcasm, but if this one thought she had any sway left with the apparatus of the Protectorate—well. She could have been far more scathing.
Wanbeng looked first at her, then at Thennjay, before she shrugged and smiled. “Then I won’t talk to Father. Go away.”
The words were childish, and from the casual way she said them, Mokoya realized Wanbeng wasn’t truly concerned about the academy at all. The girl was deflecting, aimlessly moving troops around on the board until they went away.
Still Thennjay persisted as Wanbeng turned back to shifting things from one pointless location to the other. “Wanbeng, this isn’t a game. Thousands of people could die if we do nothing.”
No response. The girl’s gaze was fixed on a particularly haphazard pile: stacked scrolls mixed with paper codices and loose sheaves annotated with ink. Her fingertips drummed on the desk surface.
There had to be something she could be pushed to care about.
Mokoya said, “Do it for your mother’s sake, if nothing else.”
Wanbeng spun as though Mokoya’s words had been a firebrand. “Don’t talk to me about my mother,” she hissed. “You don’t, you—” Her voice grew tight, then faltered. Her hands curled into weapons. “Get out.”
Something was off. Mokoya had expected grief from her, or anger. But it was guilt and fear that had taken hold of her face.
Thennjay remained stubborn, jumping onboard Mokoya’s pivot. “Wanbeng,” he said, “We knew your mother. The welfare of the city was her first priority—”
“You know nothing,” Wanbeng said. Seismic stress filled her voice. She was only eighteen, and the fragility of her youth was showing. “Nothing about her life, or her death, or—” She sucked in a breath. “You met my mother once. You never knew her.”
During this tirade, Mokoya’s eyes had fallen on one of the long, thin desks. Recognition knifed through her ribs at the same time she wondered why she hadn’t noticed it earlier. Resting on the pile of writings on Wanbeng’s desk was a beautiful, perfectly geometrical object. A coruscating, hollow dodecahedron, covered in delicate figurines of the zodiac in repose.
Everything else fell away. “What is that?” Mokoya asked, pointing, even though she knew the answer.
Wanbeng stepped in front of the desk defensively, as if to block it from Mokoya’s view, as if she could distract Mokoya into forgetting its existence. “What is what?” Her face had gone stiff with apprehension.
Mokoya could barely think over the blood-rush chorus in her head. “That trinket. Where did you get it?”
The princess licked her lips. “It was a gift. I don’t remember who gave it to me.” She answered almost immediately, but there was enough of a pause, enough of a note of panic in her voice that Mokoya knew she was lying.
“What’s going on?” Thennjay asked.
Mokoya lunged forward. Wanbeng seized her by the wrist, but one pulse through water-nature sent her flying, her hip connecting with an overladen desk. Objects clattered to the ground.
“Nao!” Thennjay exclaimed.
Her hand closed around the anchor. Again: a wash of sensations, a new bouquet of smells and emotions. Orange blossom, sandalwood and incense, a memory of running in the rain and laughing.
Mokoya held it up as Wanbeng scrambled to her feet, wide-eyed. “Where did you get this?” she demanded. “Don’t lie to me.”
“Give it back!” The girl made a swipe for it, clumsy and ineffective.
“Where did you get it?” Mokoya repeated, as Thennjay pleaded in confusion, “Nao . . .”
Wanbeng’s feet were broadly planted in a fighting stance, but fear had drained the color from her face. “You don’t even know what it is. Why do you care?”
“I know exactly what it is,” Mokoya snarled. “Who gave it to you?” And why? she thought. For what purpose?
Wanbeng’s face turned gemlike, hard and precisely cut. She defiantly tilted her chin upward. “I stole it from Tan Khimyan’s room.”
Heartbeat like thunder, tropical storm raging in her veins. “Did you?”