“Don’t you?”
“I’ve never thought much about it,” Akeha said slowly, which was only slightly skirting the truth. Ideas and feelings bubbled as though their mind were boiling over. None of it lined up into coherent, defensible thought.
“You’ll figure it out, anyway,” Mokoya said with a confidence that ended where Akeha began. They nodded to their twin, as silence took up its easy crown for the rest of the walk.
*
The circus nestled on the borders of the ragbone-meat and paupers’ quarters, in the courtyard of a disused tanning factory. Its rotting timbers and shingles formed a stern backdrop to the dozens of horse-drawn carts arranged in a loose semicircle. Circular tents of plain waxed cotton had sprung up in between them. Some had laundry hanging outside, others racks of drying fish. Along one side of the main clearing, rows of weathered benches sat under hand-erected awnings. Once, long ago, this had been a traveling circus, but weeds had grown amongst the wheels, and mold speckled the sides of the tents. Chickens pecked in the dirt, and a pot of curry simmered somewhere close by.
The eerie silence reminded Akeha of a plague ward, but suspicious eyes watched them from slits in the fabric of the tents. The only other signs of human life were a couple of rail-thin children who had been kicking a rattan ball around. They stopped and stared sullenly as Mokoya approached.
“We’re looking for the doctor,” Mokoya said.
The younger child—a boy—ducked behind the other one, a girl bearing an ironclad expression. She pointed wordlessly to one of the tents, never taking her large dark eyes off Mokoya.
The twins turned in the direction the girl had indicated. Behind them, the children burst into a smatter of furious whispers, a collision of words in their own language. Akeha did not blame them for being intimidated.
The tent’s roll-up door was closed. Mokoya pulled the heavy canvas aside and stepped in, Akeha right behind them. “Hello?”
A tall boy stood with his back to them, wrapped in patterned crimson cloth that left half his torso bare. He was sorting through an army of powder bottles on a cluttered, dye-stained table and didn’t look up. “The clinic only opens on water and metal days. Come back tomorrow.”
“I’m not here for treatment,” Mokoya said.
The boy turned around. His face, those eyes, were exactly as they had been in the light capture. In person, he seemed both more normal, and more intense than in the picture. And he was much taller than Akeha had imagined.
He was beautiful.
The boy’s expression changed as his gaze swept over the twins. Here was someone, at least, who recognized who they were.
“I have something to tell you,” Mokoya said.
Chapter Seven
HIS NAME WAS Thennjay Satyaparathnam. He had just turned nineteen, and he was a healer by day and a storyteller by night. His role as a nexus of protest was mostly an accident. Mostly.
“So this was what that Tensor was doing,” Thennjay said. He had the picture scroll stretched between his curious hands and was turning it this way and that under the glare of a suspended sunball, as if the light might reveal something of its inner workings. “She showed up at the protest with this strange wooden box, and she kept pointing it at us. I thought it was a weapon.” His laugh bubbled up from the belly. “I realized it wasn’t one when nobody died. When the Protectorate wants blood, it doesn’t usually hesitate or fail.”
The three of them were cross-legged on the floor of the tent. Akeha took another sip from the cup cradled in their palms. The liquid rolled in their mouth: spiced tea so laden with sugar and ginger it went down like a punch. Thennjay rolled up the picture with deft fingers and handed it back to Mokoya. “How does it work?”
“It’s slackcraft,” Mokoya said, slowly. “I’m not sure I could explain it to you if you’re not familiar with the five natures.” And then more quickly: “Not that there’s anything wrong with that—it’s just that it’s complicated.”
Akeha was not used to watching their twin speak this delicately, putting down words as if they were stacking porcelain cups.
Thennjay folded his hands in his lap. “I know a bit of the theory. You can try me.”
“Light,” Mokoya said, “has connections to metal-nature, for reasons we don’t fully understand yet. You can re-create a scene, the colors and everything, by copying the shape of metal-nature in a box and bringing it back to artisans in the Tensorate, who then paint what they see.”
“This is remarkably lifelike for a painting.” Thennjay reappropriated the scroll, put it next to his face, and imitated his own expression.
Mokoya ducked their head to hide a smile. “The artisans are very good.”
Thennjay had grown up on the margins of Chengbee, several generations removed from Antam Gaur. His father had been a fire breather and a storyteller; his mother a stilt walker and a doctor. In the circus, everyone took on multiple roles. Everybody did what they could. The line between community and family was thin and blurred here. When Thennjay was five, his father was among sixteen circus members arrested for putting on a series of farces, slapstick satire deemed to be insulting to the Protector. The charges laid were sedition, and the sixteen had been exiled south to perform hard labor, never to be heard from again. Thennjay’s mother had then raised him until she died of a fever when he was eleven. Then the task had fallen to the rest of the circus, much as it was able.
The boy leaned back against his table. “So what are we going to do about this prophecy, then?”
“Nothing at all,” Mokoya said. “There isn’t anything we can do.”
Puzzlement marred his face. Mokoya explained, “We’ve never been able to change the prophecies, no matter what we’ve tried.”
“We, meaning . . .”
“The Protectorate. Well, my mother, to be exact.”
“What, do you mean she doesn’t control fortune and the heavens, as they would have us believe?”
“Stop.” Mokoya smacked him on the knee as he laughed. They moved with a simple, alarming ease.
“Surely it can’t be that hard. You could just have me assassinated, for example. Then the prophecy doesn’t come true.”
“An assassination would fail. My mother has tried it, in the past. Not on you, but on someone she didn’t want getting a position I prophesied.”
“Of course she would.”
“It backfired. Not only did the person get the position, they had enough blackmail material to ensure it would be a hereditary position. For nine generations.”
“Quite a feat.” Thennjay laughed until a thought occurred to him: “Wait. Are you saying that until your prophecy comes true, nothing can happen to me? That I’m fireproof?”
“No, I—” Mokoya halted. As the boy continued laughing, they hissed, “That is not what I wanted you to think!”