Akeha’s chest crumpled like parchment fed to a flame. “You would see her killed for this?”
Yongcheow could not hold his tongue. “She’s done nothing! If we’re going to murder innocents, how are we any better than the Protectorate?”
Lady Han’s head snapped in his direction. “Silence. We don’t kill lightly.” She turned back to Akeha. “One life could save countless others.”
“You don’t know that,” Yongcheow said. “This is indefensible.”
“If you want an assassin, find someone else,” Akeha said through clenched teeth. “If this is the price for joining your movement, I choose death.”
She stalked toward him. Akeha snapped into fighting mode, crisp in the Slack, even as his thoughts jumped in electric lines: Mokoya must be warned. He might die, but Yongcheow had the gun. He could strike, inflict maximum damage, give Yongcheow the chance to—
Lady Han stood before him. A diminutive woman with the force of a thunderstorm. His mind capsized, thoughts of resistance and murder scattering like spilled beans. She surveyed the riot of emotion snared upon his face. A smile blossomed across hers.
“A man of morals,” she said. “Not what I expected of a smuggler.”
He let her words and meaning sink through him. “You asked me to murder my own sister,” he said, enunciating every syllable sharply.
“You come from a bloodline stained with remorseless familicides. I had to make sure of what you are.”
A muscle seized in his jaw. He had little patience for those who used his sister’s life as a plaything, a bargaining chip. He said, “If you wanted my loyalty, there were better ways of earning it.”
She laughed and thumbed his chin, as though she considered herself a kindly aunt. “Don’t think I’ll go easy on you,” she said, the corners of her eyes crinkling. “I will watch you very carefully, Sanao Akeha.”
He breathed out as his heart rate rappelled down to normal. But his hands remained clenched in knuckled determination. “And I will do the same.”
*
Their safe house in Waiyi was a gap-toothed cottage, cushioned by dirt rows once home to broad beans and pumpkins, now a forest of weeds. The sun had fallen. Yongcheow’s gait remained stiff as they walked the stony, serpentine path toward its silhouette. One of Lady Han’s guards had been a doctor, and his wounds had been made whole, but the pain lingered, as pain usually did.
“I’ve never met her,” he admitted. “Lady Han. I’d heard her described as remarkable, but . . .”
“There must have been a reason Mother liked her,” Akeha said. The fist of emotions in his chest had yet to ease open. The swift calculation he’d seen in Lady Han had left quite an impression. “And it would take more than courage to stand against the Protector.”
“What do you think she would have done if you’d agreed?”
“I don’t know.” Unlikely that she would have grieved Mokoya’s death.
Beside them, Tempeh snuffled in the tangled grass. The raptor had determinedly followed them into Waiyi, and Akeha had given up on chasing it away. Freed from the painful confines of Protectorate control, the creature had decided what it wanted.
“What you said to Lady Han. About the will of the Almighty. Did you mean that?”
The warm, damp evening air was a blessing. “It felt like the right thing to say.”
Yongcheow hesitated. “I don’t know how else to put it, but . . . look. To be Obedient is to live with constant ridicule. People call you superstitious, uneducated, backward. Behind your back and to your face. I don’t care what you believe, but don’t say those things just to make fun of them.”
“I wasn’t.” Akeha looked at his feet. “The past few days . . . I don’t know how to explain them. I—” He sucked in another gift of air. “I have a lot to think about.”
Tempeh ran ahead of them toward the house. Five yields away, it stopped, head alert, feathers erect along its spine. Akeha stopped Yongcheow.
“What is it?” he whispered.
Akeha gestured for silence. Within the house the Slack hung in a way that sent a frisson through him. A familiar presence waited.
Tempeh stood by the door and rumbled.
His heart a burr in his chest, Akeha pushed the door open.
At the dining table a figure, robe-clad, stood and pulled its gray hood back. Her eyes fixed on his, shining. “Keha.”
Mokoya.
She looked exactly the same. She looked entirely different. The years had changed her face, but she was still his sister, his twin. The same cheekbones, the same hooded eyes, the same crooked mouth. She had not painted her face. She was still dressed as a nun. And her hair clung to her scalp like a penitent’s or mourner’s.
“So it’s true,” she said. “You’ve joined the Machinists.”
He stepped into the house, Yongcheow behind him. The door clicked shut. His lips, out of practice, struggled to form her name. What came out instead was “What are you doing here?”
She stepped toward him, hands held up to touch his face. “Keha.”
His chest was full; his heart was empty. “How did you find me?”
“I saw you.”
He broke away from her, turning so she couldn’t see the expression on his face. “You dreamed this?”
“A week ago.”
A week ago. A black snake of fear coiled. He looked at her and saw that under her cloak, she still wore the box that collected her visions, her dreams. Everything she prophesied, the Tensorate collected and studied. A week ago. A torrent of words broke through: “What else did you see? What else do they know?”
“Who?” She followed his line of sight. “Keha—no. No! I destroyed that vision. You can do that, you know. I don’t hand everything over to Mother. If she’d hurt you, I—” She couldn’t complete the thought.
Akeha tightened his lips. Mokoya gave the impression she was made of glass, bright and clear and brilliant, and one blow away from shattering. She did not need to know about the grave they’d left in the forest.
“Your friends are safe,” she said. “I wouldn’t betray them to Mother.”
The snake within him struck. “But you let her have the one with the attack on the palace. The one that started the purges.”
He saw the shudder that went through her. “I had to! I had to. They were carrying explosives, Keha. Hundreds would have died, many of them innocents, if I’d done nothing. How could I have predicted what she would do with it?”
“She’s Mother. What did you think she would do with it? Pardon everyone involved? Say oh, it’s nothing, there’s nothing to worry about?”
“Keha, I—”
“No, she’s right.” Yongcheow’s interruption was fueled by a core of panic. “Unwarranted as it is, your mother’s retaliation would have been worse if they’d succeeded. If they’d blown up a whole section of the Great High Palace, she’d have had people executed in the street.”