“I did. I steal her trinkets all the time. You saw me, and you said nothing.” Her face flushed. “That thing was hers; now it’s mine. Give it back!” The girl made another lunge for it and missed.
Mokoya held the anchor over her head. She was no longer a person, just a collection of screaming nerves. She folded the Slack around herself and was gone.
Chapter Thirteen
IT’S NOT AN ANCHOR, Mokoya thought. It’s a signpost. Or a key to a series of doors. With the dodecahedron in her hand, the Slack lit up with a constellation of beacons, each one whispering to her with flavors and emotions, a near-overwhelming chorus of feeling.
She picked the one she knew: the tastes of summer, fruit ripe and sweet.
Mokoya unfolded onto the shifting ground outside Bataanar. The sands swallowed her balance and sent her to her knees. She pushed herself upright one-handed, the other still clutched around the anchor. Black fury had swallowed the brilliant shock and confusion on her right arm, turning the skin the color of char, the color of a starless night.
Bramble’s serrated form stood stark against the sea of canvas peaks. Phoenix was nestled asleep under her wing, waking as Mokoya strode by, her steps kicking up long plumes of fine sand. Mokoya ignored Phoenix’s plaintive bleats as she vanished into the ant-nest interior of the tent city. The incandescence of her anger left little space for anything else.
Rider had lied. They had lied to her, and she had believed them, like a fool. Fuck. Cheebye. Always the trusting one, she never learned, she always ended up regretting it—
Rider was reading, curled on the bed with one of the journals she had given them, when Mokoya entered the tent. The smile on their face evaporated as she stormed toward them. “Mokoya? What—”
Mokoya flung the anchor into their lap. The object rolled off and onto the bed. They stared at it as if it might explode.
“You know what that is, don’t you?”
“I—” They twitched like a rabbit.
“Pick it up.”
Rider shook their head. “Mokoya, please, let me—”
“Pick it up.”
Rider’s shaking hands obediently lifted the anchor off the bed. They held it at arm’s length. Their voice was reedy: “You went to see the princess.”
“You lied to me.” The words burst out of Mokoya like spear points through the throat, through the chest. Rage and betrayal were going to split her from the inside, rip her into a thousand shards of flesh and spit her into the wind. “You put this anchor in Tan Khimyan’s room. You stole her notes.”
They gasped. “What? No. I did not.”
“And I wouldn’t have known if Wanbeng hadn’t taken the anchor from her room.”
Rider pleaded, fingers white against the anchor, “Mokoya, you’ve got it wrong, I—”
“You summoned that naga.”
“No!”
Mokoya struck the anchor from their hands. “Stop lying to me!”
Rider cried out and ducked; as Mokoya stood over the bed, chest heaving, dizzy on her feet, she saw that they were curled in an animal cower, pressed to the bed in fear.
The anchor rolled on the ground, grating and grating, its orbits degrading into successively smaller and quicker ones. On the bed Rider shook and gasped. What had she done?
Mokoya’s mouth and throat were dry. “I wasn’t going to hit you. Rider, I—” She reached out.
Rider flinched. A blink, a shudder in the Slack, and they’d flashed to the other side of the tent. Mokoya turned. “Rider, wait.”
“I didn’t do it,” they whimpered. A groan cracked their voice, like ice the second before it collapsed into rushing river.
Mokoya stepped toward them. “Rider—”
The Slack spasmed. Rider was gone. In their wake they left kaleidoscopic polygons that whispered, Outside, outside. Mokoya tried to follow but failed. She wasn’t calm or practiced enough for this form of traveling.
She scrambled outside into roiling chaos. In the distance, Bramble bellowed in protest, disturbed from her rest. Rider was leaving.
Mokoya sprinted after them, heels twisting in soft sand. The narrow guts of the tent city were not friendly to quick movement. She collided, shins and elbows and shoulders, with crates and animal cages and irate merchants who spewed obscenities at her. “Cheebye!” she spat back automatically.
She’d seen the kind of fear that now drove Rider. It was the fear of someone who had endured one beating too many.
What had she done?
When she reached Bramble’s side, Rider was already mounted. “Wait,” she shouted up, “Rider, wait!”
“Don’t touch me,” Rider beseeched. “Don’t come near me.”
“I wasn’t going to hurt you,” Mokoya said. “I would never hit you, I promise.”
“I didn’t do it,” they repeated, as if they had forgotten how to say anything else. They drove their heels into Bramble’s side, and the naga took off.
Mokoya collapsed in the tidal wave of displacement. “Rider!” she shouted after them.
Nothing. Bramble cut away into the sky. All strength left Mokoya. The ground was calm, heat and mass and weight, a wide unmoving swath in the Slack. Unlike herself. She wanted to be the ground. She lay down. She stopped moving.
Breath on her neck, a massive nudge against her side and back. Phoenix, agitated, checking in on her. She didn’t understand what was happening, why her friend had been taken away, why the one who was not her mother was so upset.
Mokoya wanted to touch Phoenix, wanted to calm this one who was not her daughter. But she couldn’t speak or move her head. She floated in and out of focus. Count something. Count your breaths. Say something familiar.
The Slack is all, and all is the Slack. The Slack is all, and all is the Slack. The Slack is all, and all is the Slack.
That’s how Thennjay found her, lying in the sand, shadowed by Phoenix, mouth moving soundlessly over and over again.
“What’s going on, Nao?”
She looked up at him, broad and stark against the sky. His sweat-coated chest heaved with air; he must have run there from the library tower. He was worried. He was right to be worried.
“Rider’s gone,” she said. “I scared them.”
He knelt beside her and helped her up. “Did they do something?”
“They’re the ones who called the naga.”
Thennjay frowned. “Why would you say that?”
“Because they are.” What he needed was an explanation from the old Mokoya, the clever one, the one who wasn’t a cracked and draining person.
“That thing you found in Wanbeng’s room. That was proof?”
She nodded.
“And you’re absolutely sure?”
She inhaled until her chest hurt. She couldn’t just nod in assent. She had to say it. Her mind had to form the words, her tongue had to shape them, her lungs had to give them life.
“I am sure,” she said.
“Nao, I’m sorry. I don’t know what to say.” Thennjay held her arms gently. She couldn’t tell if it was pity or sympathy in his face. She supposed it didn’t matter. “What shall we do now?”
She didn’t know. “I need to think.”
“Are you going to tell Akeha?”
Something in Thennjay’s voice told her he knew that she wasn’t sure, that she was lying when she said she was. “Thenn, I need to think. Please, leave me alone for a while.” The words came out more desperate than she had intended. “Please.”
Chapter Fourteen