Nothing. The raptors had found nothing.
Mokoya’s fingers tightened around Phoenix’s reins. If she listened to common sense, it would tell her to return to camp immediately. It would tell her that lingering alone in a naga’s territory with a dead communications device was tempting the fortunes. It would tell her that there were worse things in this forsaken world than having to fend off Adi’s wrath, as if she didn’t already know.
She whistled and sent the raptors farther east to comb through more of the valley.
As Phoenix slouched after the sprightly creatures, her clawed feet sinking deep into the sand, the weight of the dead transmitter pulled on Mokoya’s left wrist, reminding her what a fool she was. Mokoya ignored it and reasoned with herself, running guilt-assuaging lines of thought through her head. This assignment was an abnormal one, and abnormal circumstances called for abnormal tactics. She was making the right move, plowing through unturned ground as fast as she could.
The sooner she found the naga’s gravesent nest, the sooner they could get out of this blighted desert with its parched winds that could peel skin and blind the unwary. And that was the sooner Mokoya could get away from Bataanar and its web of things she did not want to get tangled up in.
Naga hunting was a specialty of Adi’s crew. In the uncharted south past the Demons’ Ocean lay the Quarterlands with their permissive half gravity, separated from the Protectorate by the claws of sea tempests that no ship with hoisted sails could cross. Megafauna lived there: crocodiles the size of ships, sloths the size of horses, horses the size of houses.
Above all, there were the naga. More lizard than serpent, they soared through the skies on wings of leather, bird boned and jewel toned. These were apex predators, graceful and deadly, inscribed into the journals of adventurers with the kind of reverence reserved for the gods of old. A single bite could cut a man in half.
But even gods had limits. When the storm winds caught unwary naga and tossed them across the Demons’ Ocean, they turned ugly and ravenous, struggling against the newfound heaviness of their bodies. Full gravity ravaged them, sucked them dry of energy, turned their predator’s hunger into a scything force of destruction. Mokoya had seen countrysides decimated and villages torn to shreds as they attacked and devoured anything that moved. The crew ran capture-and-release operations whenever they could, but over the two years Mokoya had worked for Adi, through dozens and dozens of cases, only twice had the naga been allowed to live.
And yet. The stupidity of humankind knew no bounds. Calls north of Jixiang meant an escaped pet, scarred by chains and fear. Smuggled eggs, hunting trophies, bribes from Quarterlandish merchants: the wealthy and privileged had many means of sating their lust for conquering the unknown. Naga raised in full gravity grew up malformed and angry, racked by constant pain, intractable once they had broken their bonds. Adi said that killing these creatures was a mercy. Mokoya thought it should have been the owners who were strung up.
Then there was this case. The Gusai desert lay in the high north, on the edge of the Protectorate’s influence. There was nothing out here except hematite mines and a city to house the miners in: Bataanar. The naga they hunted hadn’t come from here. The trail of reported sightings, breathless and disjointed, pointed a straight line toward the capital city, Chengbee. Between Bataanar and Chengbee stood a thousand li of mountains and barren wilderness, two days’ travel for even the most determined flyer. And wild naga hunted in spirals, not straight lines. Straight lines were the precinct of creatures that knew their destination.
That was the first abnormality. The second was the naga’s size. From the mouths of frightened citizens came reports of a beast three, six, ten times larger than anything they’d ever seen. One exaggeration could be excused by hyperbole, three could be explained as a pattern induced by fear, but two dozen meant some form of truth was buried in them. So—the creature was big, even for a naga. That implied it wasn’t a wild capture, that something had been done to the beast.
The third abnormality wasn’t about the naga. It was Bataanar itself. An ordinary citizen might consider it a humble mining city of a few thousand workers, watched over by a dozen Protectorate Tensors and the raja, who was answerable to the Protector. A Machinist would know that Mokoya’s twin brother, Akeha, had turned the city into a base for the movement, a nerve center of the rebellion far from the Protectorate’s influence. And an ordinary Tensor might not know anything about the tremors of power that rumbled under the foundations of the city, but a well-placed one would know that Raja Ponchak, the first raja of the city, had passed two years ago. And while Ponchak had been a Machinist sympathizer, her husband, Choonghey—the new raja in her stead—was not. Bataanar was a recipe for disaster, on the cusp of boiling over.
The fourth abnormality was not, in fact, an abnormality, but merely a rumor. A rumor of Tensor experiments in the capital: whispers about a group who had taken animals and grafted knots of Slack-connections—like human souls—onto their physical existences. The details of these rumors sent uncomfortable shivers of familiarity through Mokoya. She felt somehow culpable.
Putting these four things together, one could only guess that the naga they hunted was one of these unfortunate experiments, sent by the Protectorate to destroy Bataanar and cripple the Machinist rebellion. The fact that the creature was skulking around and killing desert rodents for sustenance lent credence to the idea that someone was controlling it. It was waiting for something.
Abnormal circumstances, Mokoya reminded herself. Abnormal tactics. She was being perfectly rational. Adi would agree with her on this. Or maybe Adi wouldn’t. But Akeha would, her brother would, he would understand. Or Yongcheow. Or—
Mokoya exhaled shakily. Now was not the time. She had drifted from the present again. Pay attention. Focus on Phoenix, patient and rumbling under her. On the sand bluff the raptors had disappeared over. Focus on breathing.
Something was wrong. Her right arm hurt. An ache ran from the tip of her scale-sheathed fingers to the knitted edge of her shoulder, where the grafted skin yielded to scar tissue. Spun from lizardflesh, her arm called naga blood through the forest-nature of the Slack. Was the beast close by? Mokoya clenched her right hand. Tendons emerged in pebbled skin turned yellow by stress, but it didn’t help.