THE SUN FELL and rose again while Mokoya dissolved on the bed. She drifted in and out of consciousness, the long, twisted happenings of the day unfurling within her like tea leaves in hot water. Fragmented faces and lines of arguments broke through the surface of her thoughts before sinking again. Things that she had missed or ignored when they happened gained a dubious significance with every successive apparition. In the marsh of half sleep, everything was perfectly logical, but nothing made any sense.
Her capture pearls stood in a line on the makeshift desk, tempting her with their stores of happiness. But they were untouched. Now was not the time.
Eventually a semblance of lucidity returned to her. Outside the tent it was darkening: sunfall again. Had she really lain on the bed for six hours?
Rider loomed heavy in her thoughts. She walked herself through all the brief moments they’d shared together, like a pilgrim circling a sacred arena over and over, hoping to find enlightenment.
Something wasn’t right. The map sketched out by the events didn’t make sense, didn’t join up into a recognizable landscape. Rider was the one controlling the naga, but they were with Mokoya when it attacked the city. Why hadn’t Mokoya noticed anything? Why did Rider risk their life fending off the beast?
She regretted lashing out at Rider. In another version of the world, where the threads of fortune had woven a different braid, they could have sat down together and fileted out a sensible truth, exposing the spine of reality that had to be buried within the slippery flesh of lies and narratives.
The bed still smelled faintly of Rider. She was plagued by visions of them as they shivered upon it, as they held up the anchor, terrified of what Mokoya might do. You went to see the princess, they had said, their voice quaking.
Mokoya opened her eyes, jolted by realization. Why did Rider say the princess? The anchor was supposed to be with Tan Khimyan. Unless—
The last moments in the library tower tore through her head with adrenaline-stripped clarity: the clutter, the blazing light, Wanbeng’s nervous flurries of activity.
Those notes.
Air occluded Mokoya’s chest. Shards of evidence fused into a glittering whole. “She lied to me.”
Wanbeng had lied to her. She hadn’t stolen the anchor—it had been in her room all along. Rider had said as much. And it was Wanbeng who had stolen Tan Khimyan’s notes. They’d been right there, in her room, hiding in plain sight.
And Rider? Had she colluded with Wanbeng? Or tried to stop her?
She leapt to her feet, scrambling for her talker. She had to tell Thennjay—Akeha—they might all still be in danger—
Too late. A horn wailed from Bataanar’s walls.
Cacophony from outside: people shouting. Adi’s raptors barking from elsewhere in the camp.
No.
Mokoya snatched her cudgel from the ground and ran out of the tent.
There: a sound like a giant’s heart beating, the sweep of massive wings. The naga was in the sky, heading straight for the unprotected city, exposed and vulnerable like an oyster cracked open.
Adi and the crew spilled from the tents alongside her. Where was Thennjay? In the city?
Adi grabbed her arm, the wrong one, and the force of her grip sent angry black up the reptile skin. Mokoya pulled it back with a hiss.
“Do something,” Adi said.
The naga’s mouth opened. It let out a long, peculiar screech, and fire erupted in a volcanic blossom. The plume scorched the top of Bataanar’s outer walls. Mokoya’s chest twisted. Akeha.
“Watch Phoenix,” she told Adi.
The naga sailed over the walls of the city.
Mokoya clenched her fists, held her breath, and folded the Slack.
She stumbled onto uneven rock on the edge of the city and went to her knees. Fifty yields ahead, a man lay burned and dying on the ruined floor, blood seeping through cracked skin. One of Akeha’s city guard.
Mokoya reached for water-nature, tensed, leapt forward. The movement carried her fifty yields, a distance no mortal could cover unaided. She landed, tensed, jumped again—from city wall, to roof, to city wall again. The Slack was alive around her, like the wind, singing to her as she sang to it.
She had to get to Wanbeng. She didn’t know why the girl was doing this—Some grudge? Punishing her father?—but she had to be stopped.
The naga was circling, coming back for another attack—
Boom.
Reds lit the sky. Mokoya fell as the walls shook. Fifty yields away, a cloud of sulfur and carbon billowed into the air. The Machinists had a cannon, a crude solution to the problem of the naga. Crude, but effective: when the creature sailed by overhead, its side was wet with blood.
Boom. The Machinists fired again. Smoke and fire cut an arc through the sky from a point on the city wall.
But the naga learned fast. It swerved, terrifyingly quickly for something so massive, raised one wing, and then—
Water-nature pulsed, and the fireball rocketed backward toward its point of origin.
“Cheebye—” Mokoya gasped as she fell forward. The explosion tore into the city wall, the force of it ripping through the stones all along its length.
Akeha.
A smoking black crater was gouged into Bataanar where the fireball had landed. She had a searing image of Akeha lying in the rubble, flesh burned raw, bones shattered to pieces, breath failing in scorched and punctured lungs while she scrabbled for something—anything—to tie the threads of him to—
The naga screeched. It was turning toward the center of the city—toward the raja’s palace, toward its highest point—
The library tower. The princess.
Mokoya got to her feet. The naga landed on the domed tower in a crouch, its massive wings obscuring half the palace. It dug its hind feet in, tearing into masonry like a child tears through a paper box. Stone rained down in chunks.
Three hundred yields between Mokoya and the library tower. She saw the map of peaked roofs and shingles between them, charted a path, and—
She was off, soaring lighter than air, each leap covering twenty yields, footfalls barely disturbing a scale of roof tile. The naga peeled away from the tower, making another circle, preparing for a second assault. Mokoya saw the hole it had trepanned into the domed roof.
She landed on the dragon-encrusted tip of the raja’s receiving pavilion. One more leap and she was at the foot of the library tower, on the ground at last. Stairs wound upward, convoluted and too long to climb. Mokoya jumped from window to window, ignoring the tremor in her limbs, ignoring the deadly quake of her heart. The window in the top layer lay broken open, a yawning lobotomy of cracked roof. She clambered through, tumbled inward, rolled on the floor, and got to her feet.
“Wanbeng,” she said, “I know what you’re doing. You have to stop.”
Among the toppled shelves, the shattered glass, the scattered papers, Wanbeng stood straight as a tree, face incandescent with anger. A traveling box was slung on her back.