Rider sighed. “You blame yourself for this.”
“I know it’s foolish. I know I don’t shape the prophecies. I know things happen that I cannot change, but—”
They put a thin finger to her lips. “Hush. In another iteration of the world, we might never have met. It was fortune’s blessing that we did.”
“In another iteration of the world, you would live on.”
“Yet this is the one we have been given. We must make the best of it we can.”
Mokoya pressed her forehead to theirs and gasped her way through the torrent of emotions engulfing her. Their trembling fingers clung to the bones of her cheek and neck.
Rider’s breath ghosted over her lips. “Lie with me,” they whispered, brimming with heat. “Forget the world in my embrace. While we still can.”
“Yes.” She would have let Rider swallow her alive if they’d asked. There was nothing she would deny them. Not now.
Chapter Eighteen
MOKOYA STRUGGLED TO FIND sleep. Unease chewed at the corners of her consciousness, as though she had forgotten something, but could not remember what. Next to her Rider, exhausted and fragrant, had fallen into a pattern of deep and easy breaths. They’d spent hours describing life in the Quarterlands, telling of thousand-yield trees that took days to climb, of ringed dwellings that nestled in the canopies, of forest floors dark and unfathomable as the bottom of the ocean.
Mokoya had listened, their hands clasped between her own, trying to press every aspect of the scene into indelible memory. She had one advantage, Rider had said: this time, she already knew what the pattern of grief felt like. She would be prepared for what was to come.
Mokoya watched them sleep and tried to feel tenderness, but the unease was overwhelming, like a cramp in her fingers and toes. It drove her up, onto her feet, and out of the tent.
The sky was still dark. They had planned to set out perhaps an hour before next sunrise: the pugilists, the crew, a few of the Machinists. And Rider, of course.
Mokoya walked the tangled, sleeping intestines of the tent city until she came to its edge, where Bramble and Phoenix nested, quiet and unburdened. The oasis lapped gently at its borders. Mokoya rose onto the balls of her feet, five times, ten. It did not help.
She paced several circles into the sand and then sat cross-legged in the middle of that track. She cleared her mind, blanked her mindeye, and tried to calm her uneasiness with the weight of the Slack.
The Slack is all, and all is the Slack.
Her recitation failed. Mokoya had always been a poor student of meditation, and her mind worked against her now, scraping against her skull. Everything she heard and felt was a distraction: blood surging in her veins, wind singing, oasis moistening the night air, the hot breaths of Phoenix and Bramble nearby.
Memories, images, impressions spiraled. Rider’s voice surfaced, saying, Since she did not feature in your prophecy, her fate is not yet locked.
Her fate is not yet locked. As if her visions caused the future, and not the other way around.
Why had Rider asked her if she folded the Slack to make her visions, as if she had control over the passage of time, over the twists and braids of fortune?
Mokoya reached for that folding trick again, trying to look at the Slack in a different way. She thought of the way Rider’s slackcrafting felt, intricate patterns generated from movement behind the curtains of what she knew. The Slack was not just divided into five natures—that was the Tensorate way of thinking—but infinitely malleable, not a layer over the world but an integral part of it, inseparable from the objects it governed, more all-encompassing than the First Sutra could have ever expressed.
She dissolved all her thoughts, dissolved her mindeye.
Yet it wasn’t enough. She had to do more than that.
Dissolve the trappings of Monastery training. Discard the frameworks of Tensor study.
Dissolve memory, dissolve personhood. She was no longer Mokoya, yet she remained unchanged. A collection of occurrences in space and time, mathematical possibilities intersecting and colliding, not a living thing but a coalescence of probabilities.
And then, as though lightning-struck, the thing that was once Sanao Mokoya saw it. That thing faced the Slack as the Quarterlanders must, raw and contiguous and endless.
The Slack is all, and all is the Slack.
Time and space were just another aspect of the Slack, this fabric of the universe they were woven into. They faded in and out of focus. Sometimes they were like sheets of rice paper upon which everything marched. Sometimes they were embedded into the soup in which everything swam, just another ingredient, no more divisible than salt was from spiced broth. Sometimes they were both.
The way this thing called Sanao Mokoya was connected to the Slack was different from the way the others were connected, sleeping in their tents or stacked within Bataanar’s walls. The time nature of the Slack coiled around them, called to them, separate from what they called the five natures, separate from everything else. Yet all the same. Indivisible. Colors upon colors all melding into one color.
You couldn’t understand it if you looked only for the five natures. But once it came to you, there was no way of unseeing it.
A prophet could control the time-nature of the Slack. Those visions, born from her unconscious mind, were her uncontrolled attempts to rearrange the patterns in the Slack. And once they were laid down, those patterns became locked to the prophet’s destiny. The thing that was Mokoya saw Rider’s death, bound to her against the patterns of the Slack by threads of fortune.
For a prophecy to be undone, the prophet herself had to be undone.
Mokoya opened her eyes. She was lying on hot sand, limbs trembling with the force of enlightenment, heart pumping with the shock of understanding. She sat up, feeling like an entirely new being, resting with her hipbones against the hungry floor of the desert, at once detached from and yet one with the universe around her. The Slack sang to her, songs she had never heard before, its threads ringing like zither strings.
Prophecies could be undone. They had just gone about it the wrong way.
Mokoya got to her feet and was amazed when they held beneath her. They led her back to her tent. She knew what she had to do.
Rider still lay asleep on their cot. Mokoya had no intention of waking them. She crouched on one knee to get a clearer look at their face. Peaceful, unbothered.
“You knew,” she said softly. “You’ve always known. But you didn’t tell me, because you wanted to protect me. You knew what I would do. I understand. I forgive you.”
Rider did not stir. The day’s happenings had truly exhausted them. Mokoya stood, quiet as the breath of trees. She had letters to write.
*
Dearest Rider,