“Mokoya.” Rider watched intensely, a smile spreading along their lips, pomegranate-ripe and slow as salt. Wrapped in the gravity of their attention, Mokoya adjusted her movements into a calibrated dance.
Rider reached up and pulled her into a closer orbit. “Mokoya,” they whispered, as her lips descended upon their neck. “Mokoya,” they repeated, as those lips continued their pilgrimage downward. Rider’s voice swelled with breath as Mokoya journeyed over the words on their skin, imagining those radicals spelling commandments, poetry, laws of the universe. Mokoya. Mokoya. The world outside faded away. Mokoya closed her eyes and let herself sink into bliss, her mind utterly blank except for those three syllables, tumbling over and over again from Rider’s lips.
Chapter Six
MOKOYA WOKE to the day’s first sunrise warming the cavern, casting waterfall light on the far wall. Bramble and Phoenix were quiescent in the corner, a gentle heap of snouts tucked into tails, rib cages rising and falling.
Rider, too, remained in the drifts of sleep, curled against Mokoya’s shoulder, loops of hair loose around their face. Peace sat languid and unfamiliar in her chest: not the peace of familiar comforts, of old beddings and well-worn grooves in stone, but a clear kind of peace, like an ocean with stones at the bottom, its surface jade-blue and throwing off sunlight.
Mokoya studied Rider’s features, puzzled by the emotions that filled her. She was used to slipping from between the thighs of people for whom names and faces were mere formalities, soon to be forgotten. Yet here she was, imagining futures with this person whose history and mind were gray blanks to her. But what bright futures they were! Days spent hunting, nights spent entwined like this. She was not too old and broken to be snagged on the dangerous barbs of hope.
You idiot. You chicken-headed idiot.
Rider stirred as if they could hear her thoughts. Mokoya, they mouthed, as if still testing her name on their tongue.
“Did you rest well?” she asked.
“A little too well.” In the quiet, Rider traced the pebbled ridges on her right arm, fingers dancing on the border where lizard skin lapped at the brown twists of scar tissue. The arm was a rich crimson now, a wild and prosperous shade Mokoya had rarely displayed since she’d gotten the graft. “The colors change. Do they mean anything?”
“They’re controlled by my mood. The doctors took the graft from a blue horned lizard, which uses colors to communicate. Blue is neutral. Green is for sadness, yellow and orange for stress. Black for anger.”
“Then what about red?”
“What do you think?”
They smiled.
Mokoya had questions of her own. “Tell me about these markings,” she said, tracing a line of them down Rider’s arm. Up close, in the light, she recognized the characters as old Kuanjin script, shapes of a dead language known only to obscure scholars. “Why do you have them?”
Rider pressed their face into her chest and mumbled, “They are a record. They tell the story of my life, the things I want remembered.”
“Where did you learn to read them?”
“There are caves in the Quarterlands, deep beneath the skin of the earth, where the walls are covered with thousands upon thousands of these characters. They tell you their names if you ask.”
Mokoya shivered, to which Rider said, “I could teach you. The language is not so difficult, especially for a speaker of modern-day Kuanjinwei.”
She traced the character strokes printed at the apex of their shoulder. Something stirred under her finger, a phantom flutter of tiny wings. “These aren’t ordinary tattoos, are they?”
“No. They are tensed into my skin, into my flesh. I made them so they will burn into my bones upon my death.”
“You do these yourself?”
“Of course.” They detached from her, rolling onto their back. “I spend many of my days alone, Mokoya. If something happens . . . I do not want my existence to go unremarked upon. I do not want to be an anonymous set of bones scattered in the desert, chanced upon by travelers and discarded.”
A springtime of questions flowered in Mokoya’s head, and she imagined picking them off one after another, in some version of the future with long, balmy hours for sleep. She imagined comfortable days spent learning new languages, words passing from tongue to tongue.
She stretched. “I have a question.”
“What question?”
“When you gave me the anchor yesterday, you said you fold the Slack.”
“Yes.”
“Can you explain that?” How did one fold something that had no shape, no beginning and no end?
“The Slack knows neither time nor space—it is all that ever was and all that ever will be, connected together. If you bring one point to another, you can travel between them.”
“I don’t understand.” It was like imagining a color invisible to human eyes.
“My time in Chengbee taught me that the way I see the Slack is different from a Tensor’s conception of it, Mokoya. Your confusion surprises me, however. Do you not fold the Slack when you seek your visions?”
“No, they come to me unbidden. There’s no folding involved, no tensing. It happens when it happens.”
“So you have no control over the process?”
“No.”
Rider looked at the cavern roof, considering this piece of information. Then they rose to their feet. “Come. I can show you.”
They both got dressed and stood in the middle of the cavern.
“Close your eyes,” Rider said.
Mokoya cleared her mindeye, and they both became radiant spots against the fabric of the world.
Rider took her hands and tensed.
The world shuddered, sudden and seismic, like the ground was a cloth that had been snatched away. The sound of water washed over her as the air embraced her with cool damp. Droplets flecked her skin. She opened her eyes next to the cascade of oasis water, Rider shimmering before her in the new light.
“Did you feel that?” Rider asked.
“Do it again.”
This time, she watched the Slack as it moved. Not just the simple motion of tensing, pulling on threads and connections. A wholesale shift. She’d never experienced anything like it.
Rider’s voice echoed through the cavern: “Your turn now.”
Mokoya blinked. “That’s a little—”
“You must try. You have the capability.”
Mokoya closed her eyes again. She cleansed her mindeye, recited the First Sutra—
“Forget everything you have learned. It will not help you.”
She hissed in annoyance, her focus broken.
Outside the caverns, in the desert, someone shouted her name. Again and again, the sound echoing back and forth. Searching for her. Desperate.
They stared at each other. “Thennjay,” Mokoya said. “Something’s wrong.” She broke into a run, headed for the boundary between cavern and passageway. “Thenn! It’s me, I’m in here!”
The whirr of lightcraft tumbled toward her. Whatever momentary peace Mokoya had found was drowned by an acid-sharp flood of adrenaline, thick and frothy in her throat and chest.
Thennjay arrived like an avalanche, presence filling the chamber, gaze sweeping across the scene. “Oh, great.”