THENNJAY MET THEM ON the steps of the monastery. “Akeha,” he said.
That rolling thunder voice had not been changed by the seasons. It was deeper, perhaps. Roughened, chafed by the weight of the world around him. But it still bore the same magnetism, the same compelling gravity that enveloped the listener in its orbit. Or maybe Akeha was comparing the present to an unreliable past. He stood in front of a man who had, for the past eighteen years, existed as little more than a voice over the talker and generous, looping script on parchment. Thennjay was no longer the lithe boy he’d once met and barely remembered. The years had broadened his chest, added heft to his leonine features. His beard flowed as freely as his abbot’s robes.
He stood waiting, tall and glorious even in his grief, and Akeha could not find it in himself to approach the man. He stopped several yields away, an ocean of missed opportunities and wasted futures roiling between them.
It was Thennjay who closed the gap, arms enveloping Akeha in a great embrace, one wrapped around his back, one cradling his head. In that rush of warmth and scent, all the anxiety and fear that had built in him finally came unbound, bursting within his chest like overripe fruit. He gripped Thennjay hard around the spine, and whispered, “I am so sorry,” over and over, eighteen years of penitence spilling from the broken dam of his lips.
Yongcheow bowed graciously when Akeha introduced him. “At last we meet,” he told the Head Abbot. “I’ve heard nothing but wild stories about you.” Thennjay extracted a smile from somewhere for Yongcheow’s sake. They should have met under happier circumstances. This, too, was Akeha’s fault.
He said: “Mokoya—is she . . .”
Thennjay looked stricken.
Akeha wet his lips. “I want to see her. Please.”
“Come,” he said.
*
They had put Mokoya in one of the stone halls of meditation. Breaking its age-old rules, Thennjay explained, the monastery had accepted a large number of adult initiates in recent years, and some of them had been high-ranking doctors in the Tensorate. Refugees, in so many words, but now their skills had saved Mokoya’s life.
Not saved, exactly, Thennjay told him. They had tried their best, and she was still alive, but only just.
“Tell me what happened,” Akeha said.
Eien loved animals. She especially adored the monastery’s raptor pack. Every morning, at first sunrise, Mokoya would indulgently take her to feed them.
They’d done this too, when they were children.
Except that this was a time of insurrection, and the monastery was no longer a simple house of tranquility. The backyard was home to a congregation of Machinist devices in various stages of testing. Numbered among them was a gas-compression heater.
As they found out that morning, there were flaws in its design. Fatal ones.
“Eien was the closest to the explosion,” Thennjay said. “Mokoya . . . she . . .” He gestured to the stone hall they were approaching, unable to complete his sentence.
A raised bed had been installed in the middle of the hall, a fragile thing dwarfed by the vastness around it. Two doctors stood in attendance.
Akeha’s steps forward took eternity after eternity. The patient lay half smothered in white sheets. He couldn’t focus on her face, couldn’t focus on anything. There was so much wrong, so much to look at.
Mokoya was unclothed, swathed in a sarcophagus of bandages through which red seeped like ink. Her right arm was encased in a bubbling, irregular cocoon; a cocoon that looked like it was made of living flesh; a cocoon that hummed like a thousand wasps were at work within. Above it, transparent jelly clung to the right half of her face, a thick gel that masked nothing of the seething, burnt flesh beneath. A mask of ridged gristle smothered her nose and mouth, flapping wetly like fish gills.
Underneath all of that, it was still Mokoya. His sister. The person he had come into this world with—the person he could not imagine this world without—
“They’re rebuilding her arm with a lizard graft,” Thennjay said. “But her lungs are too badly burnt. There isn’t enough healthy tissue left to rebuild them, and we can’t use a graft.”
“She’s dying,” he whispered. He wanted to touch her. He was afraid to.
Mokoya’s eyes flicked open, wide and staring.
“Moko?” He felt her come alive in the Slack, tangled in the webbing of connections the doctors had woven around her. “Moko!”
Her eyes shot back and forth, then zeroed in on his face. Her reaction—recognition—preceded a panicked response, as she struggled to sit up, clawing at the living mask with her left hand. As Akeha reached for her, the doctors burst forward with overlapping calls of “Tensor Sanao—”
Mokoya pulled the mask off, gasping, barely making out the words “Keha—”
“No, no.” He held her, supporting her head, her body, terrified of making things worse. “Moko, please—”
Her skin instantly slid toward grayness. Air rattled through the ruins of her throat and lungs as she clutched at Akeha’s face with her remaining hand. Her blue lips moved, trying to form words. “You came.” A misshapen smile ghosted across her face. “I wanted to see you—I—”
I’m so glad, his twin whispered in his mind. He felt relief flood her. She only wanted to see him one last time.
Another rattle. She slumped in his arms, eyes rolling backward, mouth falling open. Akeha, arms locking up, screamed her name. He couldn’t let go, she had to wake up, she had to look at him, breathe—Mokoya—
Thennjay pulled him away and clung to him, nails digging into skin, as the doctors reattached the mask and coaxed breath back into her. “She’s alive,” Thennjay whispered, holding on, rocking slightly. “She’s alive.” He said it over and over like a prayer.
Thennjay released him only when the doctors stepped back, Mokoya’s condition stabilized. Yongcheow squeezed his arm, fingers distorting the flesh. “How can I save her?” Akeha asked. His voice echoed through the hollows of his throat. He looked at Thennjay. Looked at the doctors. “How can I help?”
Thennjay said, “You’re identical twins.”
It took half a minute for Thennjay’s meaning to register in the bedlam of his mind. Akeha filled his lungs, the withered aching things hanging exhausted in his chest. He glanced at Yongcheow for a brief, confirmatory moment. “Take whatever you need,” he said. “Do it now. I want you to save her.”
Into the silence that ensued came a cascade of sound: feet, running. A breathless acolyte tumbled into the hall, white with fear. “Venerable One,” he gasped. “Protectorate troops—what do we do?”
The acolyte was little more than a child, his voice only beginning to change in his throat. “How many?” Thennjay asked.
“A hundred, more, I’m not sure. A lot. They have weapons.”
“They’re here for me,” Akeha said.
Thennjay shot him a look, and Akeha knew he was going to confront Mother’s troops alone, to pretend that he wasn’t harboring a dangerous fugitive. “Stay here.”
“Thenn—”