Akeha did not back down. But neither did he attack.
Tze-Fong glared at the five men. “Get out,” she snapped. When they looked at each other, she said, “Did you hear me? You want him to kill you? Get out!”
They scrambled.
Only when the last of them had crossed the inn’s threshold did Akeha extinguish the flame he’d created. “Tsk,” Tze-Fong clucked, looking at the body on the floor, soaking in its own blood.
“I’m sorry for the mess,” Akeha said. His ears rang and rang and rang, a chorus of bells that had no end.
Tze-Fong’s face twisted. “Don’t need. This one, he burned one of my girls yesterday. Threw hot soup in her face. Bastard.” She kicked one splayed arm. “I’ll clean up.”
“Akeha.” Yongcheow’s warm, familiar hand descended on his shoulder. “Are you all right?”
He shook his head.
Tze-Fong sighed. “It’s true, you know. What the bastard said.”
Akeha looked at her. “My sister?”
She nodded. “I talked to somebody in the capital earlier. There was a big explosion, some accident or something. The little girl died.” She looked at Akeha’s face. “Sorry.”
“What kind of explosion, how big?”
Tze-Fong shrugged helplessly. Of course she wouldn’t know—how would she know?
“What about my sister? Did they say anything about my sister?”
“That one—don’t know, sorry. It’s all rumors only. No official announcement. Maybe won’t have one at all.”
He breathed deeply. “I need a carriage to the city.”
“I don’t have carts free. But I have one horse carriage. You want? It’s only a bit slower.”
Akeha nodded. Words had died in his mouth.
Chapter Twenty
HER NAME WAS EIEN, and she was six. At the age of three, she had told her mother she was a girl, and had not changed her mind thereafter. A light capture of her, sent by Thennjay with one of his dutiful, seasonal letters, showed a nut-brown child with bright eyes round as marbles, and fishbowl-shaped hair. The light capture came on a new kind of scroll, which looped through five seconds of the girl breaking into a gap-toothed giggle, something reminiscent of her mother in the way she ducked her head.
She liked animals and the color yellow. Outside of that, Akeha knew nothing. What her laugh sounded like. Whether she skipped while running down corridors. Or if she liked running down corridors at all.
Akeha managed to get Thennjay on the talker as they left the city. The man’s voice, iron-weight, tonelessly told Akeha what he already knew: There had been an explosion in the monastery. Eien was dead. Mokoya was grievously hurt.
An attack? Akeha had asked, fearing poisoned air and contaminated water.
No, Thennjay said, an accident. One of our own.
Something built by the Machinists had gone wrong. Not a blow dealt by the Protectorate. Not a gaping mouthful of demonic fire. Not yet.
Come quickly, Thennjay said. A carnivorous fear had hollowed out his voice. I don’t know how long she has left.
The horse carriage rattled over stones in the road. Bunshim was just a day’s travel away from the capital, but to Akeha, slowly and coolly detaching from the surface of the world, the journey was interminable. It felt like the sun rose and fell sixty times while he was trapped in that wooden box, his niece’s gift held loosely in his fingers. He couldn’t think of it as her last gift. Those words refused to settle in his mind.
He stared desolately at the smooth lobes and flutes of porcelain. There were scars on his palms: small ones, not-so-small ones. He tried to connect memory to each one. Nothing.
Yongcheow, leaning across the carriage, touched his face. “Akeha.”
A shudder lanced through him, pulling him back into the present. “I’m sorry.”
“There’s no need to apologize.”
“I shouldn’t have killed that man.”
Yongcheow sighed. “Probably not.” He brushed aside the curtain of Akeha’s fringe. “It’s been a while since . . .”
Akeha shut his eyes. He’d never told Yongcheow this, but he kept a tally of every person whose blood he had spilled. He tried to remember their faces and their circumstances, even if he never learned their names. It was like a mantra for him, whispered in his head on long nights when he couldn’t sleep, when he tried to remember the kind of person he was. The kind of person he had been. It started with the man with the knife in the alley, not long after he had fled the capital. And then the two boys after that, not much older than he was, just as hungry, just as desperate. On and on.
Yesterday, that tally had stood at sixty-two. Now it was sixty-three.
“Listen,” Akeha said. “You have to stay out of the city. We’ll go all the way to the border, and drop you off at the cottage there.”
“Akeha—”
“No. It’s too dangerous. For all we know, this could be a trap set by my mother. I can face her—I will face her—but I want you to stay away.” Yongcheow frowned; Akeha clamped an iron hand over his. “Please. Your research work is important. The Machinists can’t lose us both at once.”
“I can’t lose you at all,” Yongcheow whispered.
He looked away. “I’m sorry.”
The finite nature of the world meant that the horse carriage eventually did draw up to the boundary of the capital city. Akeha gave the carriage master a gold tal for his troubles and sent him on his way.
“You’ll stay hidden, won’t you?” he asked Yongcheow.
“I’ll stay hidden behind you, if you don’t let me walk by your side.”
“Yongcheow, listen—”
“No, you listen. You keep cutting me out of your family’s business, and I’ve had enough. Whatever lies in the capital scares you. I know. I understand. But it’s important to you. That makes it important to me too. I don’t want to be left out of it.”
“Do you understand the danger I’ll put you in?”
“Do I look like an idiot?” His hands met Akeha’s and latched on with a magnetic grip. “I’ll follow you anywhere, Akeha. You just have to let me.”
Yongcheow’s words were backed by the strength of mountains, by the conviction that would lead an unarmed man to stand firm against three soldiers twice his size. Akeha looked at him, really looked, and saw someone whose loss would tear a good fatal chunk out of him.
Akeha shut his eyes and offered a prayer to the Almighty.
He said, “You’ll have to stay hidden behind me. We can’t be seen together. It’s too risky. Do you understand?”
Yongcheow didn’t, not at first. But then he did, and the realization that Akeha was relenting after all dawned across his face. He nodded, his fingers betraying only a brief tremble against Akeha’s.
Chapter Twenty-one